Book Review: Perfectly Nice Neighbors by Kia Abdullah
By Doreen Sheridan
October 31, 2023
Salma and Bilal are your typical British couple looking to move off the estate and into a quiet suburban neighborhood. She’s a geography teacher and he’s a restaurateur, though the pandemic has made it really hard to keep a business afloat in the latter industry. When they first view the house in Blenheim while looking for places to buy, they’re not entirely thrilled at the prospect of moving into a neighborhood that’s so seemingly stuffy. It is, alas, the most desirable property that still fits into their budget.
An unexpected financial setback does not deter them from going through with the purchase. They are, after all, motivated:
By the time the restaurant closed, however, they had already started the process of buying their house in Blenheim and convinced themselves to take the leap. Five months later, they still hadn’t sold the restaurant premises and things were getting tight. The thought brought a familiar unease and Salma had to remind herself that they barely had a choice. Not after what happened with Zain. This was the safest place that they could afford and they would make the most of it.
Zain, their teenage son, had earlier landed in the middle of a fracas that involved the police and other kids from his estate. Desperate to remove him from the circumstances that both led up to the event and are making it harder for him to get his life back on track, Salma and Bilal are prepared to make any sacrifice.
And at first, their new neighbors seem to be quite nice, though unaware of the impact their microaggressions as white people have on their neighbors of Bangladeshi origin. Things start getting weird, however, when a small Black Lives Matter banner Zain puts up in their front yard keeps getting knocked over. Salma comes home early one day and catches her immediate next-door neighbor Tom in the act of knocking it down. Not wanting to confront him, she places the torn-down sign in her front window. When someone paints over the pane of glass where the banner is sitting, things quickly go from bad to worse to unthinkable.
Trying to bring some semblance of sanity to the proceedings are both Tom’s son Jamie and Zain, who’ve developed an easy friendship as well as an interest in going into business developing apps together. Zain tries to bring up Tom’s overreaction to the banner and to a subsequent social media post to his new friend:
“Look, you don’t have to tell me but is he a bit funny with people like us?”
“‘Like us’?”
Zain rolled his eyes. “LIke me and my mum and dad.” He waited. “Brown people,” he said impatiently.
Jamie gave him a comical look. “Mate, my dad doesn’t discriminate, all right? He hates everyone equally.”
Zain didn’t laugh. “I just don’t understand why a person gets so worked up over a banner. Or a tweet that didn’t even identify him.”
“Mate, my dad gets worked up when people don’t put things back on the right shelf at Tesco, or if they park their car an inch over their bay, or if they don’t throw out an empty box of tea from a cupboard at work. He’s a complainer. It’s got nothing to do with you being brown. Trust me.”
Passages like these make it quite clear that there’s still a huge lack of understanding regarding systemic racism in the first world, and how pretending not to see color is really just complicity in a power structure that privileges some at the expense of others. It’s truly strange how some people will argue situations while insisting that the details of the power dynamics within them be stripped off, pretending that very important information – such as race – is merely decoration, when that very “decoration” is what gives nuance to the issue. It’s silly and lazy to treat people equally when what society needs is for every individual to be treated justly. Equality, for example, would mean that everyone gets a hearing aid whether they need it or not, which is a bizarre waste of resources. Justice would mean that those with hearing impairments would be provided the ability to access the same information as everyone else. Pretending that there is no difference merely feeds into the rhetoric of people who take satisfaction in keeping other people down instead of working to progress society as a whole.
Kia Abdullah knows how to write a thriller that will leave readers guessing right up to the very last page. She isn’t afraid to tackle controversial issues in a vividly entertaining manner. In Perfectly Nice Neighbors, Her examination of the ways in which women are blamed for things outside of their control was especially thoughtful. There’s definitely much to think about within the pages of this domestic yet undeniably political thriller.