A New Novel About An Egyptian-American Teenage Girl Was Picked for Required Reading at Stamford's AITE High School

Could a novel about a teenage girl who overcomes intolerance and finds fulfillment be the inspiration for a computer game? A Stamford, Connecticut high-school teacher and her class thought so after they read “Rebels by Accident” by Patricia Dunn, a Stamford resident, and came up with several creative design possibilities.

Every summer, the students at the Academy of Information Technology & Engineering High School (AITE), a magnet school in Stamford, Connecticut, are required to read a book.

For the summer of 2015, principal Tina Rivera selected Rebels by Accident for the school’s 700 pupils to read. “We look for a book that provokes discussion and that’s what this book does,” Rivera said.

But quite unexpected was that some of the students would look into designing a computer game based on Dunn’s novel.

Rebels by Accident is about Mariam, a teenage American girl who is jailed after a night of fun and under-age drinking at a high-school party she crashed. After police uncover marijuana at the gathering, Mariam is placed behind bars with some of the same girls who delight in bullying her at school because she is an Egyptian-American.

It gets worse. In the hope that Mariam will abandon what they consider her rebellious ways, her disappointed parents decide to send her to live with her grandmother in Cairo, Egypt. Mariam was two years old when she last saw her grandmother.

Mariam won’t be going alone. She will be joined by her close friend Deanna whose single mother is looking for a similar cure for her daughter.

Mariam’s mother tells her daughter. “Your grandmother is a little tough, I’ll admit, but she isn’t a female Attila the Hun.”

“No she’s Darth Vader’s evil sister,” Mariam answers. Her mother says, “Mariam, I don’t know what has gotten into you, but if anyone can straighten you girls out, it’s your sittu.”

Grandma it turns out is wise, also understanding of the girl’s needs and desires, and even blogs on the internet. A social revolution is taking place in Egypt and Mariam is caught up in it. She experiences a transformation and identify change that is not exactly what her parents had in mind.

Brenda Zanga, Business and Technology Teacher at AITE, gave her game design class an assignment to come up with a game concept for any aspect of the book. Many possibilities were proposed. “My students only came up with game concepts — they did not actually create the games but they could,” Zanga said.

Reading the book was also an assignment for a tenth-grade English honor class at Saunders Trades and Technical High School in Yonkers.

Dunn grew up in the Bronx. Her son is a student at AITE in Stamford.

She received a bachelor’s degree in Drama Studies from SUNY Purchase College and earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, where she is now Assistant Dean, Graduate Professional Studies. She is also the Director of The Writing Institute at the school.

She has written for Salon.com, Christian Science Monitor, Village Voice, The Nation, LA Weekly, and other publications.

A Huffington Post reviewer in a recent article called the book “The next best young adult novel.”

Rebels by Accident is a 312-page young adult novel released by Sourcebooks Fire on December 2, 2014. it is available in paperback and online from Amazon and at other digital publishing sites.

Photo: Academy of Information Technology & Engineering High School (Stamford, CT) principal Tina Rivera (left) and Rebels by Accident author Patricia Dunn.