Love, Hate and Other Filters

Love, Hate and Other Filters is a young adult novel written by Samira Ahmed. Published in 2018, the novel tells the story of Maya Aziz, a 17-year-old Indian American teenager in Batavia, Illinois. The book, Ahmed’s first, was nominated for the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award. It received critical acclaim for its diversity and was popular among teenage readers.

Maya is the daughter of Asif and Sofia, Muslim Indians who came to the United States from Hyderabad before she was born. As the book’s narrator and main protagonist, Maya relates her story with wisdom, sarcasm, and teenage angst. Each chapter ends with a short, third-person narrative about Ethan Branson, an American teenager who blows up a federal building in Springfield, Illinois—an intentional allusion to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Maya has a secret. Though her parents want her to study law or medicine at the University of Chicago, Maya aspires to be a filmmaker. She secretly applied to New York University to study film. After receiving acceptance into NYU, she struggles to tell her parents. Though the news upsets Asif and Sofia, they eventually agree to let her go. They change their minds, however, following a terrorist attack in Springfield. The suspect is thought to be Muslim. When their office is vandalized and Maya gets beaten up for being Muslim, they want her to stay at home and commute to a local college. Maya realizes that she must fight for her dreams. She informs her parents that she is going to NYU in the fall, and they disown her.

Though this friction between dreams and expectations is the novel’s core conflict, Maya also struggles with cultural expectations around dating and marriage. Sofia wants her to get married after college and is excited when a young Indian suiter takes an interest in Maya. But Maya has feelings for Phil, a classmate at her high school. Phil and Maya build a special friendship founded on their shared struggle to meet parental expectations, but they ultimately part ways to follow their respective dreams. Maya learns that determining her own future is not simple or easy—it can be painful and sad, and it fractures her relationship with her parents. But after asserting her independence and accepting her mixed identity—American, Indian, and Muslim—she comes into her own and pursues her dreams.