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.

Afghanistan

Jill said, "Hi, Bonnie: I finished Hosseini's latest book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which is also set in Afghanistan. This was another powerful story, like The Kite Runner. My review is here."

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss, and by fate. As they endure the ever-escalating dangers around them, in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul, they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

Afghanistan

Juliette said, "I too am really tempted, partly because I am reading Bookseller of Kabul and have others lined up that would fit in! Seriously, I think this is an excellent idea to encourage broader world wide reading."

With The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad has given readers a first-hand look at Afghani life as few outsiders have seen it. Invited to live with Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul, and his family for months, this account of her experience allows the Khans to speak for themselves, giving us a genuinely gripping and moving portrait of a family, and of a country of great cultural riches and extreme contradictions.

For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities—whether Communist or Taliban—to supply books to the people of Kabul. He has been arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned, and has watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. Yet he had persisted in his passion for books, shedding light in one of the world's darkest places.

This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family—two wives, five children, and many relatives sharing a small four-room house in this war ravaged city. But more than that, it is a rare look at contemporary life under Islam, where even after the Taliban's collapse, the women must submit to arranged marriages, polygamous husbands, and crippling limitations on their ability to travel, learn and communicate with others.

Afghanistan

Jill said, "I have some suggestions ... (2) The Kite Runner (Hosseini)- Afghanistan."

Amir and Hassan are childhood friends in the alleys and orchards of Kabul in the sunny days before the invasion of the Soviet army and Afghanistan’s decent into fanaticism. Both motherless, they grow up as close as brothers, but their fates, they know, are to be different. Amir’s father is a wealthy merchant; Hassan’s father is his manservant. When the Soviets invade Afghanistan, Amir and his father flee to San Francisco, leaving Hassan and his father to a pitiless fate. Those are the bare bones of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, but the story hinges on one character's need for redemption.
__________

UPDATE (6-14-08): Wendy said, "I just finished reading The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. It is an impressive first novel which reveals the horror of what has happened, and continues to happen in Afganistan. My review can be found here."

Bonnie: "Continues to happen" is such an apt phrase, coming as it does one day after the violence in Afghanistan that occurred during an escape from Sarposa Prison in Kandahar province, the Taliban's former stronghold. An Associated Press article says:

... dozens of militants on motorbikes attacked the facility late Friday. Seven police and several prisoners died in the assault ... One suicide bomber detonated a tanker truck full of explosives at the prison gate while a second bomber blasted another escape route through a back wall. Rockets fired from inside the prison's courtyard collapsed an upper floor. The police chief of Kandahar province, Sayed Agha Saqib, said 390 Taliban prisoners were among the 870 inmates who escaped.