All royalties from the sale of this book will go to Women for Women, an organization that supports health and education projects in Afghanistan. A map, glossary and author's note provide young readers with background and context. The Breadwinner is a novel about loyalty, survival, families and friendship under extraordinary circumstances. Forbidden to earn money as a girl, Parvana must transform herself into a boy, and become the breadwinner. One day, he is arrested for the crime of having a foreign education, and the family is left without someone who can earn money or even shop for food.Īs conditions for the family grow desperate, only one solution emerges.
Parvana's father - a history teacher until his school was bombed and his health destroyed - works from a blanket on the ground in the marketplace, reading letters for people who cannot read or write. Over two million copies of The Breadwinner Trilogy sold worldwideĮleven-year-old Parvana lives with her family in one room of a bombed-out apartment building in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital city.
(Apr.) FYI: All royalties from the sale of the book will be donated to Women for Women in Afghanistan, dedicated to the education of Afghan girls in refugee camps in Pakistan."All girls The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis." - Malala Yousafzai, New York Times However, the topical issues introduced, coupled with this strong heroine, will make this novel of interest to many conscientious teens. In addition, the narrative voice often feels removed ""After the Soviets left, the people who had been shooting at the Soviets decided they wanted to keep shooting at something, so they shot at each other"" taking on a tone more akin to a disquisition than compelling fiction. However, the story's tensions sometimes seem forced (e.g., Parvana's own fear of stepping on land mines). There are some sympathetic moments, as when Parvana sees the effect on her mother when she wears her dead brother's clothes and realizes, while reading a letter for a recently widowed Taliban soldier, that even the enemy can have feelings. The Taliban laws require women to sheathe themselves fully and ban girls from attending school or going out unescorted thus, Parvana's disguise provides her a measure of freedom and the means to support her family by providing a reading service for illiterates. Parvana's brother was killed years earlier by a land mine explosion and, for much of the story, her father is imprisoned, leaving only her mother, older sister and two very young siblings. Eleven-year-old Parvana must masquerade as a boy to gain access to the outside world and support her dwindling family. Ellis (Looking for X) bases her contemporary novel on refugee stories about the oppressive rule of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
0 kommentar(er)
