![]() ![]() Her portrayal of trauma and people’s capacity for coping with it are compellingly authentic. ![]() The Ontario-based Ellis, author of Looking for X, works as a mental health counsellor in Toronto and toured refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Part of what makes this book a page-turner is its sharply realistic detail. Will Parvana be caught by Taliban officials? Will her father be returned? Tension is strung tightly throughout the narrative. Disguised as a boy, she starts working in the marketplace where she used to help her father. Then, when the police raid their home and arrest their father on the pretext of his foreign education, it is up to Parvana to earn the family’s living. Her mother, a former journalist, seethes in the family’s one-room apartment. There is no more school for Parvana and her sisters. Yet when the Taliban decree that women must give up their jobs and appear outside their homes only when dressed in a burqa and accompanied by a male, things seem intolerable. Having grown up amidst bombed-out buildings and land mines in Kabul, Afghanistan, Parvana knows her way around dodgy circumstances. The eleven-year-old heroine of this fast-paced novel is old beyond her years and highly adaptive. ![]()
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