Book Review: Tahira in Bloom by Farah Heron

Last year, I taught Angie Thomas’s YA novel, The Hate U Give. I loved many aspects of the novel (Thomas is a brilliant writer), but I’ll focus on one. Thomas crafts a world, centralizing teens who find themselves in the whirlwind of police brutality, court cases, and high school. These aren’t the precocious teens of Dawson’s Creek or even critically acclaimed bildungsroman (novels of growth, that usually trace a character from childhood to early adulthood). The same nuances about race that I appreciated in Thomas’s work are the ones I appreciate in Farah Heron’s Tahira in Bloom.

The novel chronicles a Desi teen’s summer away from her Toronto home. An aspiring fashion designer, Tahira had planned to spend her summer interning for a Toronto-based designer. A series of mishaps lands her in Bakewell, a small town 90 minutes away from the city where they are devoted to horticulture. Tahira must navigate her floral allergies, a flighty best friend, working at her aunt’s store, and a neighbor who is both intriguing and irritating. Heron is clearly a gifted romance writer: the novel includes a fantastic meet-cute, and relatable teen angst.

As a scholar, I spend my time attending to the representations of race, gender, and disability. My research and training gives me a wide historical and cultural perspective with which to understand contemporary literature. I bring these skills to bear in my work as a sensitivity reader. When I read published work, I am attuned to how authors present historically marginalized characters? Are these archetypes? Caricatures? Can the characters be awkward? Nuanced?

I applaud Tahira in Bloom for how Farah Heron creates historically marginalized teenage characters. I find her subtlety in doing so particularly noteworthy. For instance, Heron has two Black characters. She introduces them without racial markers, emphasizing their personalities, their concerns, and their interests before their racial identities. This is a technique many Black feminist writers use to place the emphasis on the story and to curb the tendency to identify a character by their race alone. That is, race, along with other social identities, becomes a structure – cultural, legal, social – that helps shape a character’s world, rather than determine their personality.

Yet, Heron does not shy away from discussing race. She includes a series of exchanges where the characters are uniquely attuned to how race is working. Through the protagonist, readers understand how certain jokes are derogatory, even cruel. Fascinating to me, Heron does not always place these concerns in the mouth of the Black characters, filtering thought about race through the Desi protagonist. Neither of the Black characters are anyone’s “one Black friend.”

Significantly, these encounters stand out in the text because race is a primary focus for the first-person narrator. However, these encounters are not the only ways that race is underscored. Smaller, subtle interactions carry the weight of race as a cultural and social force like Tahira’s family motto, the Black and Desi parents’ expectations, the understanding of one Black character as weird because of her interest in books, et cetera. In other words, race in Tahira in Bloom functions as it does in the real world: it is everywhere. I would be remiss if I did not point how this undercuts Canadian narratives of harmonious multiculturalism. The teen characters crystallize the import of race in their daily lives.

I also found the references to disability to be refreshingly anti-ableist. One of the minor characters has a temporary disability and, because of this, is asked to participate in an event. She is transformed into a token. She uses the occasion for her invite to highlight someone living with a permanent disability; it becomes a professional opportunity for that person. As Christina Sharpe notes, all books are a pedagogy. Here is but one example of teaching readers about tokenism, ableism, and accomplice work.

Given the recent news items about Instagram and its effect on teen girls, I was happy to see clear references to the variation of bodies. Tahira comments on someone being long-waisted as a matter of how to style them, not as a matter of judgement. In true teen fashion, she does use the person’s body-type as an insult later. Contextually, it makes sense. Characters do not have to be perfect. Tahira also remarks that her dress form is not sample size, but her size, but the author never says what her size is. As a formerly chubby teen who liked fashion but was rather embarrassed about my body, I deeply appreciated that. It allowed me to imagine my former self inside the text.

If you’ve read the book or others by Farah Heron, please let me know!