Review Detail

WHAT I LOVED:
Karma and the rest of the cast are flawed, well-drawn characters all too much like the soulless demons we all were in middle school. All of us. It's just a fact that every child loses their soul while they're in middle school and can only get it back upon entering high school. Anyway, after the new girl gets everyone started teasing Karma for the small mustache growing on her face, she turns to her faith as a way to cope with and rise above the bullying. Also, she ends up having a very bloody excursion with shaving that demonstrates why I prefer my hair removal lotion.

Honestly, putting into detail why Karma and her story enchanted me so is difficult. It's more easily spelled out in bulletpoint fashion: relatable situations like how much it sucks to lose your best friend as you start middle school, on-point humor, the frank way it deals with the rarely-talked-about issue of body hair, my desire to wrap Karma up in a blanket and keep her safe from the world...

Lemme tell you a story and I swear it has a point. In elementary and middle school, I had a bully named Kaely. We were in all the same classes and she always sat behind me due to adjacent surnames. Generally, I was terrible at effectively fighting back against my bullies, but after years of her grading my papers wrong. I was DONE by the time we hit eighth grade. The straw that broke my back was her dumping the dirt from her shoes all over my schoolbooks when we were in American History. (We had the desks you stored your stuff underneath in wire baskets and she used mine as a footrest.)

My solution: do what I usually do, which was ask her politely to stop. If she didn't, I'd just leeeeeeean down like I was going to get something from my stuff and stab her feet through the holes in her tennis shoes. These instances were the only times I ever took up any physical or verbal arms against a bully.

I do not recommend this course of action to anyone, but it demonstrates the situational courage I wanted to lend Karma and how much I cared about her. It only worked because I had the perfect conditions in place. The teacher absolutely loved me (it's always been like this with my teachers and I'm not sure why) and he did not like Kaely one little bit because she was a chatterbox. Therefore, when I'd strike back, he didn't do anything when she complained. Well, he did nothing until he moved her elsewhere solely because she wouldn't stop talking with her seat neighbors during class. Then my problem was solved!

WHAT LEFT ME WANTING:
The only way I don't recommend Karma Khullar's Mustache is if you're the type who is deeply affected by secondhand embarrassment. That may sounds a little odd, but I've met readers for whom secondhand embarrassment via a fictional character is a real problem that keeps them from reading a book--and Karma goes through a lot of embarrassing stuff. I'm not usually bothered by such things and even I had to put down the book sometimes because I was cringing so hard on Karma's behalf.

FINAL VERDICT:
No matter where your body hair falls on the spectrum of out of control (Karma's) to barely a problem (mine), Karma Khullar's Mustache is an entertaining tale that accomplishes the nigh-impossible by making you look back fondly on middle school. Body hair is still a pain and a half, but it course be worse. Like that time period blood stained the back of my pants thoroughly and no one told me until the end of the day. (At least no one teased me about it afterward. I suppose they draw a line somewhere.)