This is a memoir labeled as fiction possibly to protect from a law suit, because the guilty who are also famous are named and there is a lot of finger pointing here. Akhtar speaks with wit and anger about being not just the son of immigrants and not just a brown skinned man in a racist country but also of being a Muslim with a name as well as a skin color that mark him as an enemy to white supremacists in a post 9/11 environment that went on to elect a xenophobic president who thinks like them, and acts as they wish to act, all while he is looking down on them and making fun of them. The book is bitingly clear on the things that he loves and things that he hates about his country. It clearly holds up a mirror to the hypocrisy that surrounds him. There is good and there is bad, and he sees and feels both of them equally, and what comes out has made him a marked man. He cannot go to Pakistan because he is not Muslim enough, not a supplicant, and yet he is treated unequally in the home of the free, and he speaks out about it in the land of the brave. This is a good and also a hard read.
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