This paper presents a reader reception study of Egyptian author Mīrāl al-Ṭaḥāwī’s award-winning novel Brooklyn Heights as read by diverse groups of national and transnational readers and critics. Originally written in Arabic and published in Cairo in 2010, al-Ṭaḥāwī’s diasporic novel relates the story of Hend, a single mother who immigrates to New York City from Egypt with her young son. The non-linear, fractured narrative centers on Hend as she wanders between present-day life in post-9/11 America, childhood memories in a Bedouin village, and her married life in Cairo. Within a year of its publication, Brooklyn Heights won a major Arabic literary prize that provided translation into English and publication with the well-established, international American University in Cairo Press, which successfully introduced the novel to global, Anglophone markets and audiences. Using data collected from the social cataloguing network Goodreads, I analyze bibliographic data, ratings, and identity markers like language and location, and provide critical, close readings of Arabic- and English-language reviews of al-Ṭaḥāwī’s novel. I bring commentaries by these lay readers (referring to Guillory’s distinction) into conversation with relevant, contemporary debates among professional readers in works of postcolonial scholarship and in Egyptian literary journals, specifically the problematic discourse on kitābat al-banāt (girls’ writing) in which al-Ṭaḥāwī often featured. Drawing on postcolonial studies, reader and reception studies, and cultural studies, e.g., Amal Amireh, Graham Huggan, Samia Mehrez, Sarah Brouillette, and James Procter, I identify and examine alternative modes of reading employed by Goodreads readers that traverse linguistic and national boundaries and defy the kinds of reading typically anticipated and practiced by critics and scholars. These modes include, most prominently, emotional and anthropological readings, conflation of the author and her text, and harsh criticisms of literary prizes like that won by Brooklyn Heights. I argue that such varied, non-critical reading practices, far from being invalid, provide valuable insight into reader engagement with the novel and, when examined alongside literary critical approaches, reveal the role of the reader—both implied and actual—to be a consistent, underlying concern regardless of readers’ language, country, or profession, and a key factor in how they read this text and its author. This paper is part of a wider call to incorporate more critical studies of readers and reception into postcolonial literary studies, which traditionally has either neglected this aspect or privileged Anglophone readers and scholarly reading practices.