Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s The Royal Abduls is an American novel in the way Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an American novel. Writers have long taken to fiction to lay out the country’s social woes on an operating table, building characters and placing them in a world that mirrors our own. The Royal Abduls is both diagnosis and treatment: An 11-year-old boy who longs to connect with his East Indian heritage is expelled from school after pocketing an ornamental knife, exposing the corrosive layers of anti-Muslim sentiment in the years following 9/11. Each branch of the genealogical tree bears the weight of the incident, buckling under presumptions of guilt as an American family in the prototypical American city of Washington, D.C. Koya, a first-time novelist and local Portlander, does not bargain with the audience for empathy—she expects it. While the adage of the American melting pot is dismissed within liberal circles, Koya remains unselfconscious in her belief in the ideal: If we have lost it, it is worth fighting to get it back.