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Last week, I reviewed the film Wicked Little Letters with Jessie Buckley, Olivia Colman, and Anjana Vasan. Since I mentioned Dame Eileen June Atkins in that post, Jeanie shared a previous post about her memoir, Eileen Atkins: Will She Do? Tina enjoyed a light read, The Mudlarkers’ Club by Jane Riley and shared photos she found of recent hauls by mudlarkers.

This is the third installment in a little journey that we took beginning with Hamnet. We liked Jessie Buckley in that movie, so we watched Wicked Little Letters. We liked Anjana Vasan as the police woman in that film. That led us to We Are Lady Parts, a series that was fun and fascinating.

Anjana Vasan plays Amina, a Muslim woman in London who tries to meet the standards of her community by finding a husband to get married. The complexities of the variety of ways that people express their Islamic religion thwarts her efforts as well as her own awkwardness and her parents who aren’t as conventional as she would like them to be.

Two things happen that change the course of her journey. She develops a crush on a young man, a fellow graduate student. And she gets recruited, reluctantly, to play lead guitar for Lady Parts, a punk rock band (never mind that her performance anxiety is so bad that she literally gets sick).

I was surprised by how quickly we got pulled into the story because of how relatable the characters were — even though we are far removed from Muslim women in London. Maybe I should have been so surprised. Most of us experience awkwardness in love, desires for belonging that can be met in the most unexpected ways, transitions in friendships, questions about what we want our futures to hold and how to achieve that, and concerns about finding ways to express our authentic selves.

Besides Anjana Vasan, we enjoyed the performances of the other women in the band. I could continue this journey by watching the series Maternal that features Sarah Kameela Impey who plays the founder and lead singer of Lady Parts. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to Acorn TV, right now.

We loved the music. We’re a little old to be punk rock fans, but we liked the music in Riot Women, so we were prepared to enjoy this as well. Several of their songs are funny and nearly all of them comment on the struggles that they face as Muslim women in England.

Have you seen We Are Lady Parts? What did you think?