A fresh new voice in French fiction, Faïza Guène humorously and poignantly describes the life of a French Arab girl, Doria, growing up in the city of Livry-Gargan. Living with her doting mother, a hotel maid, and abandoned by her father, who returned to Morocco to find a young and "more fecund" wife, Doria takes solace in the fact that her life is governed by destiny, or as she calls it mektoub: "My mother says that if my father abandoned us it was because it was written. At our house we call this mektoub. It's like the script of a movie where we are the actors. The problem is that our screenwriter has no talent. He doesn't know how to tell nice stories." Luckily, Doria does have talent, as shown by the colorful anecdotes she tells about the cast of characters around her: Hamoudi, her pot-smoking Rimbaud-quoting crush, Nabil, her oleaginous classmate who steals a kiss while tutoring her, Aziz, the grocer with whom Doria desperately tries to match up her mother, and a host of relatives, friends, social workers, and psychologists. The result is a witty, eloquent story of a girl, aided by a mother's love, navigating her way through her own touching mektoub.