Love from Mecca to Medina

Adam and Zayneb. Perfectly matched. Painfully apart.

Adam is in Doha, Qatar, making a map of the Hijra, a historic migration from Mecca to Medina, and worried about where his next paycheck will come from. Zayneb is in Chicago, where school and extracurricular stresses are piling on top of a terrible frenemy situation, making her miserable.

Then a marvel occurs: Adam and Zayneb get the chance to spend Thanksgiving week on the Umrah, a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia. Adam is thrilled; it's the reboot he needsandan opportunity to pray for a hijra in real life: to migrate to Zayneb in Chicago. Zayneb balks at the trip at first, having envisioned another kind of vacation, but then decides a spiritual reset is calling her name too. And they can't wait to see each othersurely, this is just what they both need.

But the trip is nothing like what they expect, from the appearance of Adam's former love interest in their traveling group to the anxiety gripping Zayneb when she's supposed to be "spiritual." As one wedge after another drives them apart while they make their way through rites in the holy city, Adam and Zayneb start to wonder: was their meeting just an oddity after all? Or can their love transcend everything else like the greatest marvels of the world? (From Salaam Reads/Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

• S.K. Ali on telling YA stories informed by love, xenophobia and remembering what it was like to be a teen

S.K. Ali is a writer and teacher from Toronto, best known for her debut YA novel, Saints and Misfits. She is also the author of Love from A to Z.