A Teen Scrabble Champion Is Determined to Find Out What Happened to Her Best Friend in ‘Queen of the Tiles’

Competition, coming of age, and grief are all major themes in Queen of the Tiles, the new novel by Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf that will hit shelves on April 19.

When Alkaf introduces readers to the main character, Najwa, she is slowly adjusting to being back in her element as a champion Scrabble player on the tournament circuit after the mysterious death of her best friend, Trina. Since Trina’s death, Najwa has been struggling with grief, panic attacks, and a sense that something went terribly wrong the day of Trina’s death. When Instagram messages suddenly begin appearing from Trina’s account, Najwa wonders who would do such a horrible thing and becomes determined to figure out what really happened to her friend.

We had the chance to ask Alkaf about her new novel, her love of word games, and the inspirations behind this fast-paced mystery.

When you began writing Queen of the Tiles — a book about a teen champion Scrabble player — I’m guessing you never thought it would be released into a world that is currently enthralled with Wordle and other word games. What led you to create a novel set in the world of competitive Scrabble?

Honestly, the very first draft of Queen of the Tiles was written back in 2017 — before Wordle, before The Queen’s Gambit hit Netflix — and I wrote it for entirely self-indulgent reasons. I love words, had played in Scrabble tournaments as a teen, and before that, had tagged along while my brother spent his weekends at local tournaments. I wanted to write something really, really nerdy in a way that specifically spoke to people like me, and I’d never seen any YA that takes on competitive Scrabble.

But while your main character, Najwa, loves the game, when readers meet her, she’s also in the throes of grief because it’s her first tournament back after her best friend Trina's sudden and mysterious death. Your characters often struggle with anxiety or other mental health issues. What message do you have for readers who might be experiencing something similar to what Najwa goes through in this book?

Too many people give lip service to the idea that grief isn’t linear without really thinking about how that looks or what that means to someone actually experiencing it. What I really want readers to understand is that grieving is a process, that there isn’t one right way to do it, and that it doesn’t just stop one day. You’re never done grieving. You just express and deal with that grief in different ways as time passes.

Queen of the Tiles is also a mystery, as Najwa sets out to determine what really happened to Trina and why someone has hacked into Trina’s Instagram account to send mysterious and scary messages. Were you a mystery reader growing up? Who were your favorite authors?

I grew up with a big sister who was — and still is — a massive Agatha Christie fan. At one point, my dad and I both, for some reason, decided to raid her shelves and read them all, and afterward, we’d all discuss what we enjoyed about it, what worked for us, and what didn’t, kind of like an unofficial family book club. And till today, Agatha Christie mysteries are still some of my favorite comfort reads — which is odd, given that they usually involve some sort of death and danger, but I guess that tells you something about me (possibly too much about me, actually).

In one of your tweets promoting this book, you noted that Najwa is a hijabi who is both good at what she does and not oppressed. Why was it important to you to write a hijabi character who is the heroine of her own story (which is also not explicitly a ‘Muslim story’)?

To be clear, I think stories that talk about pain and oppression are very important ​​— our histories and cultures and experiences have been kept out of the mainstream for so long that there is a real need for those stories. But we are more than one type of story, and it is equally important to me that we see not just narratives of joy but narratives where Muslims simply get to be. Najwa is Muslim, and that informs so much of what she experiences and the way she acts and speaks and thinks. But it is not the only facet of her identity, just as sorrow is not the only facet of our collective identity. This isn’t a Muslim murder mystery; it is a murder mystery in which our protagonist happens to be Muslim. And I think that kind of representation is powerful in its own right.

The complex friendship between Najwa and Trina is the heart of this novel, and it is striking how the two girls were so drawn to each other even though they are so different. As we mentioned earlier, Najwa is from a Muslim family and wears the hijab, whereas Trina’s flashy style, makeup, and hair led many other players on the Scrabble circuit to dismiss her until they couldn’t anymore. What was interesting to you about creating this tight bond between these two teen girls?

I think we tend to gravitate to order, to want things black and white, to be able to categorically say this is good, this is bad, this nourishes, and this is toxic. But friendships ​​— and often friendships that you forge in your teens — are so much more complicated and nuanced than that. As a teenager, the ups and downs of my friendships impacted my world and my sense of self more than anything else, and I wanted to write a friendship that felt true to those turbulent, formative years, where I came to understand what I wanted and needed out of those relationships, which of them would change me for the better, and which would make me a worse version of myself. And you can see this process happening in Najwa, even beyond Trina’s death.