Books like Béni ou le Paradis privé

This small novel gives an insight into the intimate lives of French-Algerien children in the banlieues of Lyon in, I would guess, the late 60s or early 70s. The protagonist / narrator Ben Abdallah, who prefers to be called Béni, is an overweight adolescent who, though he is doing well at school, is engaged in a daily struggle to find his place in French society. I'm not quite sure that this is what is called a "coming of age novel"; it's more a coming into one's identity novel - at the last moment of the novel, the blonde girl Béni loves, France (no prize for guessing the significance of that) takes him by the hand and they walk boldly forward together. fr.m.wikipédia.org calls this novel « le roman de sa jeunesse », but it doesn't seem to reveal much about the public figure. Azouz Begag is a well-known centrist politician who was a minister during the premiership of Dominique de Villepin.The representation of life in a family whose culture and beliefs are so diametrically different from French culture and beliefs is instructive; as a Christian atheist (ie. an atheist raised as a Christian), I am curious about scepticism and secularism in other cultures, especially Islamic cultures. A little boy's unflattering comparison of his family's religion with that of the French, a religion that celebrates childhood (at Christmas) by putting on entertainment and giving gifts, is comic; in particular the remark that the only festivity for children in Islam involves cutting a part of them off. From the mouth of a child the criticism is sufficiently oblique, I suppose, not to have drawn the ire of the fundamentalists; or perhaps such people don't read novels.Anyway, though it is slight the novel is diverting at times, but don't expect too much.