Salt in the Wound, Light in the Dark: Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage

In the luminous wreckage of Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage, one finds not merely a coming-of-age tale, but a narrative of exile and yearning, of rage as inheritance and redemption. Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, All My Rage is at once intimate and epic, invoking the long shadow of generational trauma while parsing the volatile interiority of adolescence. Set in the desolate
edges of California’s Mojave Desert, this young adult novel bristles with adult pain; addiction, grief, racism, economic precarity, and yet it pulses with a hope that is neither naïve nor cheaply earned.
Tahir, best known for her fantasy quartet An Ember in the Ashes, here turns her prodigious talents to contemporary realism. But All My Rage is no less mythic for abandoning swords and sorcery; the stakes are still life and death, and the monsters here; systemic racism, generational silence, internalized shame, are no less fearsome. What distinguishes Tahir’s novel is its refusal to condescend to its teenage protagonists or to its readers. Instead, it recognizes adolescence as the crucible it often is, where unprocessed intergenerational wounds manifest in volatile and often self-destructive ways.
The narrative is split between two protagonists: Salahudin, a shy, conscientious Pakistani-American boy raised in the shadow of his mother’s illness and his father’s alcoholism; and Noor, his fierce and brilliant childhood friend, a fellow Pakistani immigrant, who suffers under the guardianship of an abusive uncle.
Their voices alternate chapter by chapter, and through them, Tahir explores a multitude of tensions between faith and doubt, legacy and self-invention, love and betrayal. Interwoven with these are fragments of Misbah’s perspective, Salahudin’s mother, whose story traverses continents; from Lahore to Lahore Avenue in Juniper, California, filling in the interstitial silences of the present.
Misbah’s presence, even after her death, looms large in the novel. A woman whose name means “lamp,” she embodies the tender resistance of Pakistani motherhood: warm, enduring, shaped by resignation but never reduced by it. Her death, early in the novel, destabilises the fragile ecosystem of Salahudin’s world and sets in motion a series of spirals. The family’s inn, a crumbling roadside motel, becomes a metaphor for the emotional inheritance left behind; battered, beleaguered, barely standing, yet still home. Salahudin, barely seventeen, becomes caretaker not only of his alcoholic father but of debts, both literal and emotional, that far exceed his capacity.
Noor, meanwhile, nurses her own wounds. Rescued from the rubble of a devastating earthquake in Pakistan, she was brought to America by her uncle, who weaponizes gratitude like a whip. Despite being brilliant; Tahir subtly but clearly communicates her intellectual radiance, Noor is forbidden from pursuing higher education. Her labor, her body, her future, have all been conscripted into the economic machinery of her uncle’s failing liquor store. Yet Noor, like the heroines of African bildungsroman narratives; Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambu comes to mind, burns with the need to self-fashion, to author her own escape.
Tahir excels at evoking the inner weather of young people caught in adult storms. Her prose is clean yet lyrical, with occasional flourishes that gesture toward the poetic without veering into overwrought territory. Here is Salahudin reflecting on his grief: “The world had ended. It had ended quietly and unceremoniously. It had ended with the slow beeping of a heart monitor and the rise and fall of a chest that would rise and fall no more.” Such moments demonstrate Tahir’s capacity to tether a grand emotional truth to the specificity of a single scene. That she can maintain this tenor across nearly four hundred pages, without ever descending into melodrama, is no small feat.
Yet for all its grace, All My Rage is a novel defined by its anger. The title is no metaphor. The rage is real; righteous, scorching, and oftentimes misdirected. Tahir does not sanitize her characters’ failings.
Salahudin makes a morally dubious decision that spirals into criminality; Noor weaponizes her intelligence and her love, knowing exactly where to cut deepest. These are not teen saints. They are broken and breaking, and Tahir lets them flail. In this, All My Rage echoes works like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, where silence, often cultural or patriarchal, breeds eruptions.
There is also a quiet political undertone to this novel, which, though American in setting, speaks fluently to postcolonial readers. The Pakistani diaspora here is rendered with neither fetish nor gloss. Tahir captures the affective textures of immigrant life; the linguistic shifts between Urdu and English, the smell of atta in the air, the dislocation of being brown in a white town. Yet there is no exoticism; these are not “ethnic” characters for the consumption of the white gaze. Rather, Tahir’s rendering of diasporic Muslim identity is rich, flawed, and profoundly human. Her characters fast during Ramadan, pray in grief and gratitude, wrestle with God not as a literary device but as a living presence.
It is also worth noting the novel’s treatment of trauma, particularly inherited trauma. Salahudin and Noor are both shaped by events they did not cause but must survive: the quiet erasure of their parents’ hopes, the insidious racism of their town, the violence of constrained dreams. Trauma here is not spectacle; it is banal, structural, quietly omnipresent. The racism they encounter is not from cartoonish villains but from systems: medical, legal, educational. And so, when Salahudin is pulled over by police in a later chapter, it is not just a plot point; it is an eruption of the silent dread that runs beneath so many lives of colour in America.
What gives All My Rage its tensile strength, however, is its treatment of forgiveness. This is not a novel in which everyone is absolved. Some wounds do not close. Some apologies come too late. And yet, Tahir is invested in the slow, stubborn work of repair. Misbah’s story, filtered through memory and letter, offers a kind of ancestral balm. Her love, though imperfect, lingers as a benediction over the lives of the living. In one of the most moving passages in the book, a character reflects: “She built something beautiful out of pain. So can I.”
For readers from African contexts; especially those steeped in the complexities of family, silence, and diaspora, All My Rage offers familiar terrain. The migrant’s ache, the tension between tradition and self-assertion, the weight of what is not said, these are thematic kin to the work of writers like Yaa Gyasi, Sefi Atta, and Teju Cole. And like these writers, Tahir is not interested in neat resolutions. Instead, she offers what Toni Morrison called “narrative sobriety”; a story that respects the complexity of life and demands the same from its reader. If there is a fault to be found, it is only that the novel, at times, over-relies on certain tropes of young adult literature: the sudden catastrophe, the redemptive love interest, the dramatic reveal. Yet these are minor quibbles, and they never derail the novel’s central vision. Tahir is too disciplined a writer to lean on formula. Every dramatic twist is earned, every emotional beat grounded.
The title, All My Rage, is both lament and invocation. It names the cost of silence and the necessity of its shattering. It reminds us that rage, particularly the rage of the marginalized, is not merely destructive, it is clarifying. Rage can tell you who you are. Rage can show you what you deserve. Rage, tempered by love and memory, can even become a form of grace.
In the final analysis, Tahir has not just written a novel; she has written a requiem for what is lost and a psalm for what might still be saved. All My Rage is a novel for our times; ferocious, compassionate, and luminous with truth. It demands to be read not just by young adults, but by anyone who has ever carried the weight of inheritance, who has ever raged against silence, and who still believes that healing, however halting, is possible