Afghanistan ~ The Breadwinner

I'm going back through books I've read and locations for each, and I've found several that should be here.

The Breadwinner ~ by Deborah Ellis, 2001, YA fiction (Afghanistan)

This is the first book in Deborah Ellis's trilogy about Afghanistan, which also includes Parvana's Journey (2002) and Mud City (2003).  I've been looking for books that show girls doing brave and exciting things, and the little girls in these three books are amazing.  They must pretend to be boys in order to make a living for their families -- because girls and women were forbidden by the Taliban to be out of their homes without a man or a boy to chaperone them.

The Breadwinner was exciting to read because I had never thought about what a family would do if there were no men or boys in it.  Parvana's brother was out of the picture before the story begins, and her father was taken away when men came to their house.  Eleven-year-old Parvana had accompanied her father when he went out to sell items on the streets, and her sister is too old to pose as a boy.  It feels really strange to Parvana to have her hair cut short and to be wearing her brother's old clothes, but she finds she is able to spread out her wares on a blanket, make sales, and buy food for the family.

"A few days later, Parvana was sitting watching the tea boys run back and forth between the customers and the tea shop.  One of the boys almost collided with a donkey.  Parvana was laughing and looking the other way when a tea boy tripped on something near her and spilled a tray of empty tea cups all over her blanket.  The boy sprawled in the dust in front of Parvana.  She helped him gather the cups that had rolled away.  She handed him the tray and saw his face for the first time.  She let out a gasp and slapped a hand across her face.  The tea boy was a girl from her class" (p. 94).

So their family wasn't the only one in need of a "boy" to go out and work.

Though this is relatively light, because it's a children's book, this book taught me about Afghanistan just as I learned from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  Well-written children's books can make me think as do the adult books.  I rated The Breadwinner a ten of ten, meaning I couldn't put it down.