There are books that ask you to feel something. And then there are books that crack open your ribcage and rearrange what’s inside before you even realize you’ve been holding your breath. Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber belongs firmly in the second category — a debut novel so achingly honest, so brimming with warmth and wit, that you will find yourself laughing and tearing up within the same paragraph.
Set against the world of a conservative Muslim high school in Toronto, the story follows Ramin Noor Abbas, a Pakistani-Canadian senior who has spent his entire life colouring neatly within the lines drawn by his parents, his Imam, and Allah. He prays. He studies. He obeys. But underneath all that carefully maintained obedience, a volcano simmers — sealed, as Ramin himself puts it, with nothing sturdier than a Pringles lid. Because Ramin is gay. And in his world, that single truth threatens to burn down every pillar holding up his life.
The Plot Without the Spoilers: A Tightrope Walk Over Fire
The beauty of Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber is how it refuses to reduce Ramin’s journey to a single conflict. Yes, this is a coming-of-age story about sexuality and faith. But it is also a story about immigration, family fractures, the quiet heroism of younger siblings, and the desperate, bone-deep need to be seen by at least one person on this planet.
When Ramin is involuntarily drafted onto his school’s soccer team (thanks to a missing physical education credit and a principal with a fondness for micromanagement), his carefully compartmentalized life starts to unravel. There’s the matter of Captain Handsome — a.k.a. Fahad, the team captain whose borrowed T-shirt Ramin can’t bring himself to wash. There’s Omar Saleh, whose kindness and quiet bravery slowly crack open something in Ramin he has spent years trying to seal shut. And then there’s Assim Qureshi, a bully who discovers Ramin’s secret and weaponizes it with chilling indifference.
What unfolds carries real stakes — not the manufactured, melodramatic kind, but the kind that sit heavy in your chest because you know these situations are playing out in real homes and real high school hallways right now.
Writing Style: A Voice You Want to Be Friends With
Ahmad Saber writes Ramin’s first-person narration with a voice that feels startlingly alive. It is chatty, self-deprecating, deeply anxious, and wickedly funny — sometimes all within a single interior monologue. Saber captures the cadence of a teenager who thinks in exclamation marks and capitalised panic, who names his internal shame a “two-headed monster” and wages war against it in real time on the page. The prose toggles effortlessly between the comedic and the devastating:
- One moment, Ramin is mortified that his mother accidentally dyed his soccer shorts pink. The next, he is alone in his room, reading the same Quranic verses about Lot for the hundredth time, searching for an answer that never arrives.
- One scene has him attending a drag show in a moment of terrified, exhilarating rebellion. Another has him pushing away the boy he likes mid-kiss because he cannot silence the voice that says Allah will never approve.
This tonal range is Saber’s greatest gift as a writer. He never lets the story tip into despair, because Ramin — for all his terror — is fundamentally hopeful. Even at his lowest, there is a part of him reaching upward, trying to reconcile rather than renounce.
Characters That Breathe Off the Page
Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber builds a supporting cast that feels lived-in rather than constructed. Zayn, Ramin’s entrepreneurial younger brother who runs a samosa business at school, is a scene-stealer — all bow ties and balance sheets, yet fiercely loyal in ways that will quietly wreck you. Omar Saleh emerges as one of the most beautifully drawn love interests in recent YA, a boy whose bravery is not loud or performative but steady and warm, like a hand held in silence on a train platform.
The parental dynamics are handled with particular nuance. Ramin’s father is neither a villain nor a saint — he is a man carrying the grief of immigration, the loss of his own father, and a worldview that he genuinely believes will protect his son. Saber resists the temptation to make any character a mouthpiece or a caricature, and the novel is richer for it.
Faith as a Living, Breathing Question
What elevates this book beyond a standard coming-out narrative is its deeply respectful engagement with Islam. Ramin does not want to leave his faith — he wants his faith to have room for him. He finds the recitation of the Quran as transcendent as the Wicked soundtrack. He prays extra prayers of gratitude when he is accepted to NYU. He wrestles with scripture not to reject it, but to find himself within it.
The novel threads the concept of Allah’s ninety-nine names throughout, and one of the most quietly powerful arcs is how “Al-Ghaffar” — The All-Forgiving — becomes not just a theological idea but a lived emotional truth that reshapes Ramin’s understanding of himself. Saber writes about Islam with the intimacy of someone who knows the texture of a prayer mat under his knees.
Where the Novel Stumbles Slightly
For all its brilliance, the novel is not without its imperfections. The pacing in the middle third occasionally sags, particularly during the soccer subplot, which — while thematically relevant — sometimes feels like it occupies more narrative real estate than it earns. The blackmail thread with Assim, though effective in raising tension, resolves a touch too neatly for the complexity it promises.
There are also moments where the novel’s desire to cover every facet of Ramin’s experience leads to a slight sense of overcrowding. The immigration subplot, the online forums, the hospital volunteering — each is individually compelling, but their cumulative weight occasionally stretches the narrative thin. A reader might wish for fewer threads woven more deeply.
That said, these are the growing pains of a debut, not its failures.
The Debut Behind the Story
This debut novel is Saber’s first, drawing from his own lived experience as a Pakistani immigrant to Canada. By day, Saber works as a rheumatologist — a detail that quietly surfaces in Ramin’s dream of becoming a doctor. The six years he spent crafting this story are evident in its emotional precision and its refusal to offer easy answers.
A Note Carried by Barn Swallows
In the spirit of the novel’s own beautiful chaos — where origami hearts carry confessions and barn swallows interrupt first kisses at the worst possible moments — I should note that this review arrives courtesy of an advance reader’s copy that found its way to me from the good folks at Simon & Schuster, like a letter slipped into a jacket pocket on a departing train. The words, the feelings, and every MAJOR question raised here? Those are entirely my own.
Books That Walk a Similar Path
If Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber leaves you hungry for more stories that navigate the intersection of queerness, faith, and identity, consider these:
- The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes — A National Book Award finalist about a queer Latina teen navigating Catholic school, rich with the same tensions between faith and self-acceptance.
- Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian — A Stonewall Honor winner featuring three teens in 1980s New York, including a closeted Iranian boy wrestling with cultural expectations.
- All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir — A devastating novel about two Pakistani-American teens exploring generational trauma, immigration, and the weight of family legacy.
- Love from A to Z by S.K. Ali — A warm, perceptive romance between two Muslim teens that treats faith as integral to identity rather than incidental.
- Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram — A tender, funny novel about an Iranian-American teen grappling with cultural identity and the ache of not quite belonging anywhere.
Final Verdict: A Novel That Defies Gravity
There is a moment late in this novel when Ramin listens to the Quran and then, in the same breath, listens to his favourite Broadway song, and wonders why both make his soul feel the same kind of weightless. It is a small moment. And it is everything.
Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber is not a perfect novel. But it is a necessary one — brave in its vulnerability, generous in its humour, and radical in its insistence that faith and queerness can coexist in a single, beating heart. For queer Muslim teens who have never seen themselves on the page, this book is a mirror. For everyone else, it is a window worth looking through.
