The Diary of a Hounslow Girl

As the daughter of immigrants myself, I can relate to Shaheeda, the 16-year-old British Muslim girl at the center of Ambreen Razia’s one-woman play, The Diary of a Hounslow Girl. Like me, she feels trapped between the expectations of her new country and the expectations of her Old World parents.

She might be descended from Pakistanis, while my parents were Cuban, but I fully embraced her statement: “The only thing I have in common with Hounslow is that I was born to leave it one day.” I wanted to leave Miami and never look back. Razia reminds me of that yearning I had so long ago — a yearning so profound that it ached —to break out of the provinces and see the world, to be myself in a way that I could never be at show more home.

Foul-mouthed and street-savvy, Shaheeda doesn’t measure up to her older, lighter-skinned, university-attending sister Aisha, now betrothed. Shaheeda’s Pakistani-born mother holds tightly to Islam and traditional platitudes. But teenaged Shaheeda wants something different — even if she’s not sure at first what that should be. Shaheeda sports both a hijab and large gold hoops, and she attends religious school as well as the local comprehensive in southwest London; however, she also smokes weed and acts up at school. During this one-woman play, Shaheeda faces a great decision of which way she should turn. show less

Yeow. Maybe I'm too old to appreciate this but mostly I wanted to shake her and hug her mother. The sound effects, for the most part, didn't add anything to my listening experience and sometimes took away from it.

If this was longer, I would have quit almost immediately. And if it weren't free, I would have requested a refund.

On the positive, though, I did enjoy the snippets of culture that were slipped in between 16 year-old young woman rage and sense of entitlement.

This well-written & performed work is a treat and provides a glimpse into a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to me.

An Audible Original, this was just okay. I thought the performance was excellent, but the audio was a bit off. The background noise was so loud that it was sometimes hard to hear the narrator speak. Additionally, the storyline, coming of age or not, was a bit of the not-good-kinda-creepy and there wasn't nearly enough culture to justify the synopsis offered on the Audible app.

If you've got a solid hour and are bored and like free books, give it a go. Otherwise? I'd pass on this one.

Audio is not the right medium for this. The nearly constant background noise was extremely irritating, blotting out the speech at times. I wasn't exactly fond of the heavy breathing of the narrator, either. She actually acted this booklet, which is fine on the stage, because this was written for the stage, but as an audio, it was a complete failure for me. The message is good, and the interview at the end of this audio book was really interesting, but all the rest was meh.