I will be presenting this book to upper elementary students when my public library youth services team visits the schools to booktalk and promote our summer reading program. Kids should find the various protagonists relatable and likeable, and they'll enjoy participating vicariously in their quest to find a missing cat! Nothing is more boring than being in an airport, and being trapped in one would be insufferable without a madcap adventure!

Wonderful, fun realistic fiction with adventure that also has depth of character and relatable discussions of preteen frustrations and struggles.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book, as this book has already been published, I will not share my review on Netgalley at this time.

This anthology represents the diversity within Muslim culture through the voices of multiple protagonists written by a variety of authors. These young kids have all attended a conference for Muslims and are stranded at the airport when all planes are grounded. They reunite unexpectedly to hunt for a social media star’s cat lost at the airport. This is a lighthearted, fun story that middle grade readers will enjoy.

This will be a great title to add to an upper elementary or middle school library! Fast-paced, multiple POV, airport adventure, and really fun characters to get to know!

Grounded is a fast-paced adventure story told from multiple characters' points of view. It is set in an airport where all flights have been grounded due to storms. Every character has their own story happening while weaving together with the others. Middle grade (4th-8th grade) readers will love this one.

Get ready to be swept away on an exciting journey through the pages of this captivating collaboration! Dive into the lives of four remarkable Muslim children whose chance encounter at the airport sets the stage for a fun-filled adventure you won't want to miss.

This heartwarming story strikes the perfect balance, making it an ideal choice for middle-grade book clubs and shared reads. With relatable narratives that resonate with 8-10 year olds, readers will find themselves eagerly flipping through the pages, yearning to unravel the mystery alongside our young heroes.

This book offers a wonderful opportunity for Muslim kids to see themselves authentically represented, while also providing non-Muslim readers with a broader understanding of diverse lives and cultures. It's a beautiful celebration of inclusivity that invites everyone to connect with characters from different backgrounds.

Fun story about a diverse group of Muslim kids stranded in an airport overnight. The characters were tricky to keep track of at first, but once I got immersed in the story, I didn't have any issues, Especially great for fans of realistic middle grade books written in multiple voices.

Grounded is told in alternating viewpoints of Hanna, Nora, Sami, and Feek. They are all Muslim and have just come from the MONA convention when all their flights are grounded due to a storm. Hanna is determined to find Snickerdoodle, a lost cat, in the airport. She drags the other kids along to help her, but they aren’t as enthusiastic about it as she is. After breaking some airport laws and getting in trouble with their parents, they still don’t find Snickerdoodle. After Hanna apologizes to the other kids and they start to get real with each other, they realize they have all been going through some hard times. This was a fun book, with great characters. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy. All opinions are my own.

A charming, heartwarming, hug of a middle grade book featuring a rag tag group of young Muslim kids who get stuck at an airport during a storm and band together to help find a missing cat. I absolutely loved all five of these characters. Each one is dealing with some heavy family issues that were so relatable and well written. Young readers are going to cheer as the group thwarts airport security and solves the case.

After all of the flights at an airport have been canceled, four tweens band together to solve a mystery. As the evening progresses, their new friendships will find common ground as they try to help one another with the mystery and their personal problems. Authors Aisha Saeed, S. K. Ali, Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, and Huda Al-Marashi come together like their plucky protagonists to write a novel that is full of heart and incredibly likeable characters in the sweet book Grounded.

Eleven-year-old Feek wishes his four-year-old sister, Ruqi, would sit still already. Then he wouldn’t have to keep an eye on her in the airport and could keep working on his poetry. He spent the entire Muslims of North America (MONA) conference hoping for the chance to get to it so he could show it to his dad, an up-and-coming rap star. It was hard enough to spend time with his dad during the conference who had to leave early. Now Feek is hoping to get his poetry just right so when his dad comes home, he can show it to him. But Ruqi just won’t give him a break, and before he knows it she’s disappeared.

Feek starts to panic. His mom is counting on him to take care of Ruqi, and he’s already gotten in trouble during the conference for not paying attention to her. Now he has to find her before he’s grounded for good.

As he starts to look for Ruqi, he runs into Hanna, Sami, and Nora. The four realize they were all at MONA together that weekend, although they hadn’t met before. Hanna is an animal lover on a mission to rescue lost cat Snickerdoodle, last seen at the airport a week earlier. Sami wants to get home on time so he can go to his martial arts tournament the next day and finally prove to everyone he’s not a wimp. Nora’s in a bad mood because her famous congresswoman mother spent the whole weekend hobnobbing with other people instead of paying attention to Nora’s upcoming special birthday.

A major storm forces all flights to be canceled, and Sami’s anxiety starts to creep up. The tournament was the one chance to show his parents and golden big brother that he’s got special talents too; how can he do that if they don’t get home on time? Hanna sees the grounded flights as an opportunity to focus on finding Snickerdoodle. It also lets her avoid a Talk with her dad about something uncomfortable. And Nora is doing her best to keep the content interesting on her NokNok profile, even though the most interesting thing to happen so far is that her mother couldn’t even bother to take her to the Chocolate Garden store in the airport before it closed. More than that, Nora is hiding a secret of her own about friends from school.

Sami, Nora, and Feek reluctantly join Hanna on her quest and find themselves traveling all over the airport to look for Snickerdoodle. Along the way, they talk about their fears and joys as well as the similarities in their backgrounds and the big differences. As the night progresses and they find themselves evading airport security and intentionally putting on a really bad musical performance, the new friends will find out that what makes them different also makes them stand out.

Authors Aisha Saeed, S. K. Ali, Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, and Huda Al-Marashi accomplish the rare feat of balancing their varying points of view with equality. Each of the four main characters has their own voice, their own challenges, and their own time on the page, but no single character intrudes on the others. Readers will get attached to different characters for different reasons, but all four of them shine in their individual stories.

At times the search for Snickerdoodle can become a little silly, and some adult readers might wonder how on earth four children between the ages of 11 and 13 and one preschooler can traipse around an entire airport before authorities catch up to them. The search, however, provides the unifying mission the kids need to explore their own hearts and lives more deeply. Their friendships become the main star of the book, and the fact that their common religion is built into the novel as a part of their lives and not as some shiny object included for diversity’s sake makes the plot that much more real and relatable.

Those wanting more diversity in their reading while at the same time maintaining a fun adventure with a lot of heart will definitely want to check this out.

"Grounded" is a work created by many authors but with the writing you wouldn't know so many contributed to this story. The mystery takes place in an airport as a group of children who previously did not know each other meet. They had all just come from a convention and are flying back to their hometowns. Each chapter shares the mystery from a different character's perspective as they try to find a missing cat in the airport. While the lack of security in the airport may not be accurate, the mystery is one I wanted to keep reading.

Can a couple of kids, Feek, Hanna, Nora, and Sami, who have just met, help each other find a missing cat in an airport? You will have to read the story to find out. Four kids around the same age, 10-12, are thrown together in an adventure that brings out the differences and yet the similarities in all of us; despite our family, religion, or interests. Hanna loves animals and is alerted about a missing animal in the airport through a group she follows, Animal Allies. She meets up with three other kids at the airport just before their flights take off. A thunderstorm grounds all their flights. Despite the possibility of being grounded by their parents, the kids decide that solving the mystery of the missing cat, Snickerdoodle, is too important to leave for airport security.
The book is written by four authors who write each of the children's viewpoints in each chapter and then combine their writing to create the full story. Each child has his/her own strengths (and quirky weaknesses) that work together to help the kids solve the missing cat mystery.
An exciting mystery that showcases themes for preteens, such as; building self-esteem, obedience to parents, and desire to work with friends to create positive change. Recommended for kids in grades 3-6.

There is beauty in embracing your life and your culture. I loved how this story was told from four different perspectives of children who come from the same religion, but all have different relationships with how that applies to their identities. Each kid has their own battle, or issue they are struggling with and through their interactions with each other they are able to start on a journey towards working on facing their problems in a healthy manner. I think that this is quite a fun book and think that kids will really enjoy going on journey to find Snickerdoodle, but along they way finding ways to feel more confident in themselves.
Thank you so much to Abrams Kids, Amulet Books, and Netgalley for allowing me to read and advance copy of this title.

Grounded is a fun adventure story about four middle grade kids (and a little sister) who are searching for a missing cat inside of an airport during a storm. I loved the multiple POVs, each written by a different author!

Four kids who couldn’t be more different are thrown together when a thunderstorm grounds their families’ flights. True, they are all twelve and Muslim, but their racial and ethnic backgrounds are diverse, as are their personality types. Find out what happens when an animal rights activist, budding social media influencer, aspiring rapper, anxious martial artist, and four-year-old force of nature are trapped in an airport, united in their desire to avoid their parents and to find a lost pet. Chapters alternate among the perspectives of Nora, Hanna, Feek, and Sami, with each character penned by a different author. The kids’ differences push their evolution, and the adventure ricochets along, realistically following the attention span of four distracted tweens and one toddler. Predictable mayhem ensues and the good-natured tomfoolery unrolls like the plot of a Saturday morning cartoon. What gets between the reader and the fun is overly expository prose. The characters narrate what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how they feel about it. This, combined with a disjointed plot, bogs down the narrative. Thanks to Amulet and NetGalley for an ARC in return for an unbiased review.

I really enjoyed the story and I know my fifth grade student will too! It was fast paced and exciting. I love the idea of using multiple authors for the various points of view from which the story was told. What a great idea! It’s really loud each of the characters to develop their own voice. I am looking forward to this becoming available, so I can add it to my classroom library.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and ABRAMS Kids for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love this book so much. For years I’ve wanted to read a book where Muslim characters got to just exist. They didn’t have to explain their identity to anyone or deal with islamophobia. Hanna, Feek, Sami, Nora, and Ruqi were just kids (and a toddler) who got to be. And it was amazing. I loved all of the characters and it was wonderful to get to see Hanna in her own book doing her own things. Also the story?? Four preteens and a toddler saving a cat as their flights are being delayed and grounded until further notice??? The whole thing was a great read and had me laughing at so many points, even when things were looking bleak for Hanna, Feek, Sami, Nora, and Ruqi (though I don’t think Ruqi cared at all that her flight was grounded, she just wanted her Cinna-Yum).

When you’re constantly reading narratives where the Muslim characters are forced to explain why they’re taking up the space they’re taking up, it gets exhausting. This book was a nice break from that for me. As I read it, I could literally feel how my eight year old self, who had never seen any of her marginalized identities represented in a book, even as a side character, would have felt.
Grounded is a story about 4 preteens and a toddler trying to find a cat, but it’s also a story challenging the idea that marginalized communities can only write discrimination-centered narratives. The four main characters were being regular old preteens worrying about various things that were important to them, but they didn’t have to worry about if someone would say something islamophobic or racist to them and how they would respond. They got to EXIST.

And I know I’ve said that at least twice now but it’s just so important to me because we deserve the right to exist in books too. We deserve to have books where the characters are worried about something other than their identity. And yes, it’s important to have those books about the various aspects of the characters’ identities, but if every single book by a marginalized author was concerned with the characters’ identities, we won’t get anywhere in both the books that we are writing and in the real world.

So huge thank yous to S.K. Ali, Aisha Saeed, Jamila Thompkins-Bigelow, and Huda Al-Marashi for writing this, it was sorely needed and absolutely wonderful. I so look forward to what we’ll get in the future in a similar vein as this wonderful book.

I loved this book. It was a quick read, but I really enjoyed the alternating POV and how all the voices dovetailed. It is clear that a lot of collaboration went on behind the scenes in order for all four authors’ voices to mesh like they did. The personal problems the kids were dealing with were very believable and relatable and their individual personalities came through on the page very clearly. I would love a follow-up book - a “where are they now” of sorts - to accompany this one, one day.

I'm loving the trend I'm seeing in middle grade and YA lit where a slew of authors get together to craft one novel, each writing from different characters' points-of-views. In this one, our four main characters are strangers at the beginning of the night, when severe thunderstorms ground all planes at the airport where they find themselves after attending a huge Muslim convention with their families. Hanna brings them together in her desperate search for a missing cat, and the four tweens (plus one little sister), though incredibly different on the surface, find connections they weren't expecting.

I have to say, despite being an animal person, I didn't care one iota about the missing cat plotline, which, unfortunately, took up the vast majority of the pages here. However, I thought the last third of this novel sparkled. It's in this last 100 pages that the characters really get to know each other and find ways to support each other. It had that magic feeling I've experienced at a church lock in or early dorm days in college, when you're thrown together with people you wouldn't necessarily consider friends, you attempt to accomplish something together and/or you stay up really late, and by the morning, you've told them all your secrets and basically can't imagine life without them all. You know what I'm saying? That feeling was captured here perfectly.

There's also so much beauty in the diversity of the representation here, showing four very different kids, both in terms of their appearance and their personalities, who all consider themselves Muslim. Even their levels of practice vary widely. I love that these authors are showing that there is not one way to be Muslim, giving all sorts of Muslim readers a chance to see themselves, and all sorts of readers who aren't Muslim a chance to see a variety of experiences. And I hope they all pick this one up when it releases in a couple weeks!

Thanks to Netgalley and Amulet Books for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

I received an electronic ARC from ABRAMS Kids through NetGalley.
These four authors blended their stories about five young people stuck in an airport due to weather. Each pre-teen's story is powerful on their own but when meshed together, readers see how community empowers us to be brave and bold. All of them have come from the MONA Conference where they've spent the weekend with their families and friends. None knew each other until they ended up grounded at the airport trying to get home. Hanna, Nora, Feek (and his little sister Ruqi) and Sami all have insecurities and feelings they have suppressed. Each has a family situation they are struggling with and afraid to share. Throughout the night as they look for a lost cat, they learn more about each other and find the confidence to share with each other. This team listens and nurtures as they realize they have become friends. I love the ending as they text each other from planes and gates. The chapters move seamlessly through the story. The authors each have their own style and worked well at meshing the plot points and moving the story forward. Looking forward to sharing this with our students.