Internment (Review)

When I first heard about Internment, it immediately caught my attention. A story about Muslims being forced into Internment camps in the U.S. is a story I had never read before but feared I would too soon on the news.

Unfortunately, most of my enjoyment of this book began and ended with the premise.

Internment is the story of Layla, a Muslim girl who remembers before. Before her father’s books were burned by her neighbors. Before she had to stop going to school for her own safety. Before she had to fear that her family would be sent to an Internment camp. It’s not so hard to remember a before since it was not so very long ago. The hard part is knowing whether they can ever go back, now that it is after.

“What’s that thing people always say about history? Unless we know our history, we’re doomed to repeat it? Never forget? Isn’t that the lesson? But we always forget. Forgetting is in the American grain.” 

I expected Internment to grip me, shake me, and open my eyes wider to the already so eye-catching problems of our society. I recently read Dear Martin, by Nic Stone, and was ready for another all-too-relevant story about our society and its problems.

I blame some of my subpar reading experience on my inaccurate expectations, but not all of them.

Although the plot centers around Muslims being put into internment camps, the book’s overall themes focus more on how young people rise up and resist oppression, and how they fight back against injustices even when it seems nearly impossible to do so.

Sure, that’s still an interesting narrative, but it’s one that has been told before, and (in my opinion) better.

Layla is not the easiest main character to sympathize with. I liked that she was a strong female character, but her anger and her hardheadedness were so strong that they seemed almost unprecedented at times. For example, even before she and her family arrive in the camp, she is thinking about resistance and escape. This leaves little room for her to change, and she shows little to no growth over the course of the story. When she is not thinking about resistance, she is thinking about her boyfriend, David, and how to see him. The reader is left to trust Layla’s longing, as we never get a full idea of who David is as a person and only get small glimpses as to how they act with each other.

This is a common thread with the other characters in the story as well and was my biggest complaint about Internment. Even important people seemed severely secondary to Layla, more so than normal even to a main character, as if they existed only for her and her narrative. The major players have only minor backstories, and either knew Layla from before the events of the book or get to know her unusually quickly. Acquaintances very easily become most-trusted best friends and romance blooms out of nowhere with little explanation as to why, with the understanding usually being that these relationships sprung up behind the scenes, in moments readers are not invited to see. Minor characters are never mentioned until the moment they are needed to join the resistance or to be harmed in some way in order to show how bad things are in the present situation. Only then are we informed of their names, usually with a short explanation of their backstory, and an affirmation that Layla had seen them around before even though they have never been introduced to the reader.

This made it extremely hard to care for characters, even when bad things were happening to them. They seemed so clearly to be characters in a story that it didn’t seem very real at all, and I never got a grasp on feeling any sadness or anger about a situation that should conjure up those emotions and more in me.

“The scariest monsters are the ones who seem the most like you.”

Instead, Ahmed conveys such sentiments by telling the reader through the first-person narrative style. Often that meant that descriptions, which would have served better, are cast aside for a more blunt style in which Layla repeatedly remarks that she has no freedom, that the situation is bleak, that she has to act and see David, and so on. Some amount of these thoughts are to be expected, but they are so prevalent and obvious that they take away from the events at hand. At times, it made it feel like I was being talked down to as a reader as if expecting that I wouldn’t understand such clear ideas.  Not only did this make me feel distanced from what was happening, but it actually made me lose track of how much time had passed and what was going on several times.

The last quarter of the book was my favorite, because more began to happen, which meant this writing-style was forced to subside a bit. Unfortunately, some major plot points in this section felt forced. Some events even occurred in a way that made them seem more or less for shock value, which did not appeal to me at all. The very end of the book then took a rapid turn which tied things up too quickly, leaving too much unexplained, specifically about certain characters and their motivations. The book does not go into detail about the lasting impact of the events of the book on the characters, and whether the final events brought about any larger change. This made the story seem almost like an isolated incident, and so, it fails to convey what could have been a significant impression on the reader.

“There’s never been a wall that people haven’t been able to get by.”

I ended up rating this book 3.5 out of 5 stars. Based on my enjoyment alone, I would have rated it lower, but I can see that it may have merits with a younger audience, which to be fair, it is meant for. However, I think that this book would be best for even a younger audience than it is targeted for. I think there would only be a small group of people who are young enough for the writing style, but old enough to deal with the violence and hard topics this book explores.

For those wanting a YA book with poignant themes and hard-hitting topics, I would instead recommend Dear Martin, which explores the issues surrounding and need for the Black Lives Matter movement and what it’s like to be black in America today.