NEW YORK – A new novel in which a 12-year-old Muslim heroine, who dons a hijab, tries to save her younger brother, has been released in New York, offering Muslim children a chance to see themselves as they read and non-Muslims an opportunity to learn about kids who are different.

“There’s so much misinformation and misrepresentation about Muslim lives,” Zareen Jaffery, the executive editor of a new imprint from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Children called Salaam Reads, told The Press of Atlantic City on Monday, April 17.

“It’s impossible to ignore the fact that Muslims are very demonized due to the actions of a deviant minority.”

The novel, “The Gauntlet,” is written by Hofstra University student Hebah Uddin and was published under a pen name.

In the novel, the 12-year-old protagonist Farah, a Bangladeshi-American Muslim, is desperately trying to rescue her younger brother, who is trapped in an evil board game come to life.

“The first time I saw the cover I actually cried,” said Uddin, 24, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in North Babylon and who wrote her novel under the pen name of Karuna Riazi, a nom de plume combining her nickname with a name of her paternal grandfather.

“I was overwhelmed because when I was growing up it wasn’t common to see Muslim girls on the cover at all. There are going to be kids who look at the cover and feel that they see themselves.”

The Gauntlet is the second book among nine book to be published annually by Salaam Reads.

Jaffery noted that the books won’t be about Islamic religion or Islamic history, but rather stories that are emotionally compelling and authentic.

Early in “The Guantlet,” for instance, an exchange between Farah and her friends Alex, who is African-American, and Essie, who is white, exemplifies the novel’s meshing of items familiar to people from Muslim-majority countries and references to mainstream American pop culture.

The three friends, who live in Queens and Manhattan, have entered into the board game called The Gauntlet of Blood and Sand to search for Farah’s 7-year-old brother, Ahmad, who ran into the game without realizing its danger.

While Uddin was in high school, she became a book blogger, reviewing middle-grade and YA books at Watercolor Moods.

In 2014, she joined a grass-roots, online movement called #WeNeedDiverseBooks, which is geared to increasing books featuring characters and authors from underrepresented races, religions, sexual orientations and with disabilities, where she met Jaffery.

“It’s been very whirlwind,” Uddin says of getting a book contract. She was stunned.

“I had to sit down; I was literally shaking. I had been totally working myself up for rejection. It still doesn’t feel real.”