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Life has dealt Bilal Abu, the 16-year-old hero of Sulayman X’s novel Bilal’s Bread, a triple whammy: Not only is he gay and a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee, but he’s also a Muslim kid living in a tough, racially tense Kansas City neighborhood in the post-Sept. 11 era. He is also the constant victim of sexual abuse at the hands of his authoritarian brother Salim, Bilal’s senior by a decade, the de facto leader of the family since their father’s death years ago at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s secret police.

Bilal’s Bread thrusts us into Bilal’s nightmare without mercy: Its very first page describes Salim and Bilal shaving each other’s privates, an activity that Salim habitually converts into rough, unwanted sexual contact. These painful moments behind closed doors contrast sharply with Bilal’s romantic awakening with his best friend, Muhammad, an African-American classmate who also happens to be the son of the neighborhood’s imam. Forging a support group from friends and family new and old, Bilal eventually takes the plunge and stands up to his abusive sibling, with results both good and bad.

At its most subtle moments, X’s novel manages to channel some of the grace and emotional complexity of James Baldwin, another author whose work probed the prejudice and hardships faced by Americans belonging to multiple minority groups. But Baldwin rarely crossed over into preachy territory, crafting works that ached for a more tolerant world without force-feeding readers their author’s politics. When X shows us Bilal’s internal world, he unveils a real gift for psychological detail and human empathy, but when his plotting requires descriptions of mob mentality—a group of older teenagers bullying Bilal with accusations of terrorism as he attempts to peddle his mother’s Kurdish breads by bicycle, for instance, or when a school’s auditorium full of children reacts to a poem by Bilal about his sexuality—his strokes feel broad and heavy-handed, and thus both less believable and less compelling.

Still, X has turned in an overall highly readable book. Bilal’s Bread’s 240 pages flip past with remarkable speed, and while it sometimes feels like empty calories, at other moments it sits with satisfying heft. Unfortunately from an aesthetic standpoint, its last pages fall into the former camp rather than the latter, but for some readers that may not be a bad thing: If you’ve ever wanted to see the story of a gay teen, a Kurdish teen, a post- Sept. 11-Muslim-American teen, or a sexually abused teen (not to mention a gay, Kurdish, post-Sept. 11-Muslim-American sexually abused teen) receive the Rocky treatment, this is your book.