March 10, 2026
The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, by Salma Hussain
As an Adrian Mole superfan who turned 12 in 1991, I was on familiar ground with Salma Hussain’s debut middle grade novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan—a year in the life of a girl growing up in Dubai who spends the summer with her grandparents and cousins in her parents’ native Pakistan before her family emigrates to Canada, a book we got free with our cereal from Kelloggs’ Feeding Reading promotion—which my daughter read and loved before I did. Although the book she read and loved was not the same one that I experienced, the central charm of Hussain’s novel for an adult reader being the gap between the story Mona is telling and what’s actually going on around her. (Mona and her sister decide to name their new baby brother Osama, after the Urdu and Arabic word for lion. “Oh, Allah, what a bright future awaits him with such an auspicious name!”). As with Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books, which Mona references here as among of her own favourites (“it’s about a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in a part of England called the “East Midlands,” which sounds a lot like the ‘Middle East,’ doesn’t it…”), a precocious young person has no idea what they don’t know, readers of their own age taking much of the narrative at face value, and still finding much to appreciate (this novel is a bit Are You There, Allah? It’s Me, Mona).
There’s a lot going on in Mona’s diary as her year kicks off—a creepy uncle who’s a little too handsy; the first Gulf War, which doesn’t even occasion a school closure (Mona is proud of herself for remembering from TV that only 383 Americans are killed in the ground offensive. Her sister asks how many Iraqis died: “Don’t be ridiculous, Tutoo. No one on TV keeps a count of dead Iraqi bodies.”); Mona’s mother’s nascent feminism; a change to the gym program requiring actual sports; and then an infatuation with Waleed, a boy who inspires poetry of the same calibre that Adrian Mole used to write for Pandora Braithwaite. Once the family arrives in Canada, a country that fails to live up many of its promises for Mona’s parents, Mona continues to do her best to stay brave and hopeful, clearly the hero of her life in her own mind—and by the end of the novel, her reader is also fully on board.
