The school is its own insular community, made up of various cliques of teenagers and not always sympathetic adults, like the math teacher who demands every time she gets an answer wrong, “How did you get into Stuyvesant?”
The only member of her immediate circle accepted at the school, Razia travels alone to Manhattan, which opens her eyes to a new world. However, Razia’s mother recognizes her daughter’s intelligence and allows her time for homework, reading and study, which ultimately leads to Razia testing into the prestigious, public Stuyvesant High School. Out of basement apartments and sixth-floor walk-ups, Muslim men started walking toward the sound, pulling their topis out of the back seats of their pockets.” One house has so many roses that “they grew up and over, through the fence like they were some kind of convicts trying to scale the walls” during the evening call to prayer, she writes, “everyone in the neighborhood tilted their heads and listened. Rehman evokes time and place like a poet, with descriptions both precise and lyrical, making the streets of this working-class neighborhood come alive on the page. The earlier, largely Jewish and Italian, immigrant residents of Simon’s day have moved on to wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. In the late 1980s, Razia’s Corona is home to a growing Pakistani Muslim community, along with Dominican and Korean immigrants.
“I didn’t see many white people there unless they were policemen or firemen, and I didn’t think Paul Simon had ever been one of those.” “Why would Paul Simon be singing about Corona?” she muses. ROSES, IN THE MOUTH OF A LION, by Bushra Rehmanīushra Rehman’s stunningly beautiful coming-of-age novel “Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion” is set in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, which was enshrined in pop culture by Paul Simon’s 1972 hit “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” Rehman’s exuberant young protagonist, Razia, knows the song well, although it puzzles her.
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