A Study Guide for Randa Abdel-Fattah's "Does My Head Look Big in This? "

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Randa Abdel-Fattah's "Does My Head Look Big in This? ", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Studentsfor all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535845731

Book preview

17

Does My Head Look Big in This?

Randa Abdel-Fattah

2005

Introduction

In Randa Abdel-Fattah's novel Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005), Amal Mohamed Nasrullah Abdel-Hakim, a Palestinian Australian Muslim sixteen-year-old, decides to wear her hijab full-time as a symbol of her commitment to Islam. As if high school were not already hard enough, Amal knows that her decision will change the way her classmates and teachers treat her. But her faith is stronger than the fear of Islamophobic comments and social pressure to fit in. Amal holds her head high in a display of courage and, with the support of her friends both Muslim and secular, begins her new life. Narrated with humor and heart by Amal herself, the novel reflects the experiences of Muslim women young and old, conservative and liberal, in and out of hijab. Throughout the story, Abdel-Fattah shows the trials and triumphs of living unapologetically Muslim in a post-9/11 world.

Author Biography

Abdel-Fattah was born in Sydney, Australia, on June 6, 1979. She is an Australian Muslim with Palestinian and Egyptian heritage. She was raised in Melbourne, where she attended Catholic primary school and Islamic secondary college. At Melbourne University she studied arts and law, and she also served as the media liaison officer at the Islamic Council of Victoria. She earned her doctorate from Macquarie University, where she studied Islamophobia and multiculturalism. She is active in the human rights movement and serves as a member of the Australian Arabic council. She makes frequent appearances as a guest speaker on television and radio programs and in schools across Australia to offer her opinions on issues such as Palestine, Islam, refugees, and racism. Invited by the US State Department to attend an international leadership program focused on immigration, she visited Washington, DC, as well as New York, Texas, and Arizona.

Her first novel, Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005), was praised by critics and readers for its realistic portrayal of life as a teenage Muslim in Australia. In 2006 she published Ten Things I Hate about Me, a second young-adult novel focusing on growing up as a Muslim girl. In 2008 she was awarded the Kathleen Mitchell Award for Young Writers and published her third novel, Where the Streets Had a Name.

This novel was awarded Australia's Golden Inky Award in 2009. Noah's Law (2010), The Friendship Matchmaker (2011), No Sex in the City (2012)—her first novel for adults—and The Lines We Cross (2017) followed. Her work has appeared in the Age, the Sydney