John O’Brien Keeping It Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780691168821, 216 pp., $29.95, £24.95.) In his research on Muslim American teenage boys, O’Brien deconstructs the stereotypes associated with Islam and Muslims in the United States (US). He focuses on the real experience of growing up Muslim and male, “an experience primarily centred on managing the competng cultural demands of religious Islam on the one hand and American teen life on the other” (p. ix). O’Brien aims at persuading the reader to acknowledge the inconsistency of the assumpton that Islam and the West work as an oxymoron, as two irreconcilable elements that cannot exist in tandem. His approach is based on the sociological studies “of high-school aged young people in the United States [which] have situated teenagers in a social world populated by a range of competng peer cultures, each with its own associated set of styles and practces” (p. 11). However, O’Brien argues that most young teenagers in the US view themselves as locatng ‘in- between’ social spaces and categories that cannot be simply associated with a specifc style and/or practce but they overlap; sociological studies have showed that young people do not necessarily “consider themselves as ftng neatly into a defned social category” (p. 13). Through his ethnographic research, conducted in a mosque (known as the City Mosque) in an unspecifed city in the US from 2007 to 2010, the author unravels the complexites of being a religious Muslim and an American teenager. These two identtes could appear as confictng with each other but they are complementary, they represent what O’Brien has defned as cultural rubrics, meaning that Muslim American teenage boys experience culturally contested lives: “urban American teen culture, as manifested in their schools, peer groups, and the media they consumed, and religious Islam as locally practced in their mosque and their families” (p. 7). O’Brien focuses on a group of boys identfed as the ‘Legendz’, a hip hop group formed of seven Muslim American teenagers and second-generaton immigrants with diferent ethnic backgrounds. In chapter one, O’Brien focuses on the dynamics of the Legendz in order to deconstruct the percepton of young Muslim Americans to highlight how it difers from that of other American teenage boys. He challenges this perspectve by suggestng that “the central concerns and preoccupatons of young urban American Muslim men are profoundly similar to those of most other American teenagers, focusing largely on coolness, pop culture, and fashion; girlfriends and romance; independence and pushing limits; and social acceptance, friendship, and family” (p. 20). The only diference 169 Book Review Journal of Global Analysis