I Hate This Book — Content Guide for Parents

On July 4th 2010, a 23-year-old run's away from her family home in Dubai. She goes to New York for one year. This book outlines the events of that year.

Coming from a Muslim family but born in England, Zena has always been struggled with the conflicting values of her two inherited cultures.

While her parents aren't orthodox and she enjoys more freedoms then many other Muslim girls, she still feels constrained and not free to be herself.

Zena and her siblings are regularly subject to corporal punishment. She and her sister are also treated differently to her brothers. While the girls must beg for certain privileges, they are readily given to the boys.

This enrages Zena and her strong sense of injustice and inequality.

Everything comes to a head after she graduates University and is told to move to Dubai with her father, who has recently transferred there for work.

Her parents believe her drug taking partying tendencies picked up at Uni would fade once in Dubai, a country more in line with their Islamic ideals.

The plan is futile because while Zena has never been a drug addict, she has been an alcoholic since the age of 18. Being in Dubai does nothing to stop her attempts to escape life with booze.

However, even with her struggles Zena comes from privilege. Her father is Doctor and Grandfather a Professor. She has lived a comfortable life.

But this changes when she arrives to New York.

With $3000 saved and nothing else, this abused, vulnerable young girl enters a world much worse than she's used to. Unprepared, beautiful, naive and still heavily addicted to alcohol, she experiences extremes and finds herself at complete odds with herself and with life.