The Golden Girl

preliminaries, character aesthetics, author's note

Malika Bashir had a darkened view of the world. Ibrahim Ahmad refused to see anything but the light.

Soon, a friend from the past appears at Ibrahim's doorstep and a mysterious set of letters are left in his bedroom. Old conflicts are raised and new facts are unveiled. Malika is forced to fight the ghosts of her past and Ibrahim is forced to see people in ways he never thought he would - leaving them both to wonder if there's more to the grey area than they had imagined.

I started this book in 2015. This book was originally published under a different name (Whims of the Bewildered) and followed the daily life of Ms. Dahlia Ahmad. As I continued to write the book, I fell in love with the side couple more (my FOG readers, you guys see a pattern yet?) and decided that Dahlia's brother and best friend were more interesting to write about.

I have published and unpublished this book several times over the years. This book has been sitting in my drafts for several years. In some chapters you can find comments sl*t shaming Malika dating back all the way to 2017. I have, in the meantime, written and published both its sequels.

Important read:

Those of who you read the sequels, my sincere request to you is to not post spoilers. I understand you're excited, you guys love these characters, but please let new readers enjoy the series and unveil the plot just as you did the first time.

I also wanted to ask you to be heedful of the comments you leave. Remember I always write from real life and real people are flawed. The FMC is the flag-bearer of teen angst who'll make you want to pull your own hair out and you have every right to be frustrated with her; however, what you're not allowed to do is call names or belittle any of my characters. If you don't like reading about morally ambiguous characters, I'm not the writer for you.

The romance in the book is one of the most unrealistic (according to my standards) I have ever written and I don't hesitate to admit it one bit. Remember, couples you read about in books are always romanticised, that is the case even with the 'realistic' couples I have written. Fictional romance should never be set as the standard of expectation for love in real life.

This book has a theme of letter writing that is very similar to the plot of the popular teen movie To All The Boys I Have Loved Before. I promise you guys,  I wrote the book before the movie came out and I was ever aware of the book/movie series. Though I don't think there's anything wrong with taking inspiration from existing literature, in this case the similarity between the two is purely coincidental.

This book plays with the typical high school tropes popularized in pop culture. Some of it is exaggerated just for fun. This is a culture-focused story. I write what I see so you'll find a lot of non-practising Muslims in this book. And even the people who have Taqwa will be on different stages of Iman. Please keep in mind a lot of the characters' actions and mindset are influenced by their culture and what is deemed acceptable by their society.

The books are set in Chittagong, the port city of Bangladesh. However, the schools and names of neighborhoods are mostly fictional.

Let this book take you back to the good, old days of Wattpad - circa 2010 - when our high schools were still ruled by the means girls and the bad boys still chased the good girls. Enjoy!

Ibrahim Ahmad

Malika Bashir

Dahlia 'Della' Ahmad