ENCINITAS — The vocabulary often eludes Huda Al-Marashi when she tries to describe the isolation she felt as a sixth grader at a new school.
In her novel “Hail Mariam,” published by Penguin Random House, the young narrator reaches for imagery she can understand, describing a “tummy of a thousand butterflies” or the sensation that “someone is blow-drying my face.”
As children grow and begin to explore themselves and their surroundings, Al-Marashi said, it can be difficult to recognize how universal that loneliness can be.
“Everybody is just like you and everybody’s struggling,” she said. “But I also think we don’t have a lot of names for those feelings.”
“Hail Mariam” follows an Iraqi American Muslim girl as she finds her footing after transferring to a Catholic school. The book is recommended for elementary and middle school readers. Al-Marashi will celebrate its release with a launch event on Feb. 24 at Warwick’s.
Even while writing, place mattered, she said. When she needed fewer distractions, she would leave home and head to the Cardiff-by-the-Sea library.
“When I really needed to get something done, I’d come to the library,” Al-Marashi said.
Some elements of the book mirror her own life. Al-Marashi also transferred to a Catholic school in sixth grade and, after later attending Catholic high school, went on to Santa Clara University. But Mariam, she said, ultimately became her own person.
“I gave her a lot of my life experiences, but I used them to show something and to say something,” Al-Marashi said. “I think that one thing that Jesuit education was very good at was teaching you to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, that being uncomfortable is a part of learning.
“And so that’s what Mariam’s going through, too. She’s very uncomfortable, but she’s going to learn that it’s OK. And she will get more comfortable.”
The novel also examines mother-daughter dynamics and the strain of navigating cultural expectations at school and at home. Mariam feels the weight of representing an entire religion to her classmates while longing for recognition and love from her more traditional mother.
“She’s carrying so much responsibility that she has to be a certain way for her mother to see her and appreciate her,” Al-Marashi said. “And she thinks that it’s all contingent on the things she achieves and does.”
It’s a theme the author has returned to in previous work and continues to revisit.
Another aspect of Mariam’s journey resonates in the current moment, Al-Marashi said: the comfort of certainty. Faith and belief are often framed in black-and-white terms, even though growth may come from curiosity rather than rigid answers.
Certainty can feel safe to children, she said, “but then we get hung up on those ideas” and struggle with the nuances in other perspectives.
“Mariam growing up and maturing is understanding there is no right or wrong,” Al-Marashi said. “There is no one way to do things.”
