Category Archives: Canadian

April 23, 2013 · 11:01 am

Nini by François Thisdale

NiniCreated by the illustrator of the mesmerizing, award-winning The Stamp Collector, Nini may be François Thisdale‘s most personal story – it’s directly inspired by his experience about the adoption of his own daughter. “It was a wonderful challenge, having to say intimate things with words and images,” he reveals in an interview for IQ Magazine, available on his website.

‘Intimate’ is exactly the word that describes this exquisite, profound journey of how a family comes together across oceans and cultures. On one side of the globe, a baby hears an unseen voice tell her of “many mysterious things,” of rice patties and lotus flowers, of a little house with a pointed roof, of golden fields and jagged mountains. “Warm and safe, she listened carefully to all [the voice] said.” When she enters the world, “The first face she saw was the sweet face that belonged to the voice. The first hands she felt were the soft hands of love.” But all too soon, the baby finds herself not in the little pointed-roof house, but in a very large building filled with many rooms. In spite of “friendly hands” that feed her, keep her clean, “they were not the soft hands that had first held her.”

Thousands of miles away, a woman “rubbed her womb” and waits for a baby that will never be. But soon she’s sent a “precious gift” – a picture filled with promise: “From the moment the man and woman saw that photo, the baby became part of them. They carried her in their hearts.” As the family comes together, they will carry her in their arms, as she will forever carry the “distant echoes” that join past and present, “like a bridge that connects one place to another.”

Evocative and stirring, almost every spread is filled with sumptuous wonder. [I add that 'almost' because of one somewhat eerie close-up baby image that gave me pause.] Thisdale’s multilayered images that combine watercolors, photos, stamps, Chinese characters, and more, create a resplendent backdrop to a story so filled with longing and love. More than just another adoption tale, Nini is stunning testimony to the power of family.

Readers: Children

Published: 2009, 2011 (Canada, United States)

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March 11, 2013 · 9:07 am

War Brothers: The Graphic Novel by Sharon E. McKay and Daniel Lafrance, illustrated by Daniel Lafrance

War BrothersIf you look at the bottom of this post at “Filed under,” you’ll see this title is listed as both “Fiction” and “Nonfiction.” That’s not a mistake – and the explanation is found in the book’s “Postscript”: “This is a book of fiction based on interviews in Gulu, Uganda. Everything that happened in this book has happened, and is happening still.”

In 2002, 14-year-old Kitino Jacob begins writing his story on a lined notepad in his childish hand: “My story is not an easy one to tell, and it is not an easy one to read … There is no shame in closing this book now,” he warns. As if to underline the warning, for those who decide to continue, the panels depicting the most harrowing parts of the story are ominously edged in black.

Joseph Kony, guerilla leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) – populated by stolen and brutalized children – is terrorizing then entire country of Uganda. On the eve of traveling to their school, Jacob and his friend Tony are assured of their safety: “Kony cannot get us. Do not be worried. We are safe. I heard Father talking to headmaster Haycoop about hiring extra guards to surround the school. There is no reason to fear Kony and his rebel soldiers.”

But on the first night back at George Jones Seminary for Boys, a motley gang of LRA recruits murder the adults and kidnap the students. “It’s true … they’re just kids!” Jacob immediately realizes, but these are the very ‘kids’ who force Jacob and his friends to kill or be killed. They are starved, abused, and turned into murderers. The “good boys,” he learns, “become especially mean, especially dangerous,” like Tony who once aspired to be a priest but is quickly transformed into a killing machine. Somehow, Jacob manages to hold onto his humanity, convinced that his father will save him and his friends.

Last year saw a fervor of Kony-related activity in the media: from the film, Kony 2012, which went viral, to the filmmaker’s public breakdown, to the outcry of what happened to almost $20 million in donated funds to the film’s producing company Invisible Children. “While Kony has lost much of his power, he continues to carry on his crimes across the border in the Congo and DRC,” Jacob explains in a final closing letter dated 2012 at book’s end. That Kony remains free is terrifying, but his LRA – as diminished as it is – represents only a fraction of the estimated 250,000 child soldiers in the world. What these children must endure after surviving war in order to even attempt to return to their former world will be an even greater battle.

While capturing the horrific tragedy of the life of child soldiers, co-creators Sharon E. McKay and Daniel Lafrance also manage to offer inspiration: war decimates, and yet everlasting bonds can also be forged. “[T]his is also a story of hope, courage, friendship, and family,” Jacob reminds. He echoes his friend Hannah, “… that if the world knows that child soldiers suffer unimaginable cruelty and pain, then help will come. I hope this is right.”

With testimony as formidable as War Brothers, we can’t say we didn’t know. And now that we know, we must help, offer hope, and make change. That’s a mantra for us all.

Readers: Middle Grade (with caution), Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2013

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March 3, 2013 · 9:55 am

The Stamp Collector by Jennifer Lanthier, illustrated by François Thisdale

Stamp CollectorHere’s how this mesmerizing book begins … and ends:

“This is a story of not long ago and not far away.
It is the story of a boy who loves stamps and a boy who loves words.
This is the story of a life that is lost.
And found.”

The boy who loves stamps lives in the city, “in the shadow of a grey prison.” His philatelism originates with “a scrap of paper on the street,” which his grandfather deems ”not rare or precious’” upon inspecting the emerald-green stamp, “‘[b]ut it is beautiful.’” In a nearby village lives the boy who loves words, who “devours every poem and fable” and yet “hungers [f]or stories.” Lost in his own world, he “finds stories all around him. He learns to capture them. He writes.”

Both boys grow up. One puts his dreams of far-away away, and becomes a prison guard. The other buries his stories within and finds a factory job. When his soul is near bursting, the village boy writes a story that brings “joy and hope to the villagers. But it brings fear to others.” His “dangerous” words land him in the guard’s prison.

Years pass, and the guard and the writer tentatively attempt a silent friendship. It begins with a single stamp passed through the bars: ”[e]very stamp tells a story without words. The writer knows he is not alone now. Not forgotten.” When stamps are not enough, the guard secretly delivers letters from all over the word that the writer was never supposed to see, each asking for “one more story.” The writer weakly whispers, the guard bravely listens … and just how much both are willing to risk for that final tale is a bittersweet triumph to behold.

Captured in remarkable, atmospheric art by François Thisdale, who fills the pages with such exquisite, breathtaking details that will make you pause with every turn, The Stamp Collector is both illuminating storytelling as well as an act of sheer defiance. Author Jennifer Lanthier reveals in her closing essay, “Freedom to Write, Freedom to Read”: “This story was inspired by two writers: Nurmuhemmet Yasin and Jiang Weiping.” The latter, a journalist, lives free in Canada after surviving six years in a Chinese prison for exposing government corruption. The former, a writer, has already lost 10 years in jail for writing “The Wild Pigeon,” a short, allegorical fable that represents the indigenous Uyghur experience under Chinese rule. In 2009, the International PEN Uyghur Center‘s website tragically “… reports from credible sources that Nurmuhemmet Yasin may have been tortured to death in prison.”

“Countless writers” remain trapped throughout the world, Lanthier reminds, “because of something they wrote.” Organizations like PEN International are advocating on behalf of these writers, and also corresponding directly with the prisoners and their families “… to reassure them that they are not forgotten.” In solidarity and support, partial proceeds from Stamp are being directed to PEN Canada, which helped orchestrate Jiang Weiping’s release and immigration. That’s irrefutable testimony to the power of words: while words can tragically bind you, words are also the very tools that can – and will – set you free.

Readers: All

Published: 2012

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December 24, 2012 · 10:10 am

Astray by Emma Donoghue

Maybe it’s the craziness of the season, but I’ve really been appreciating short story collections. This latest title from Emma Donoghue – the author of the phenomenal Room – is an intriguingly composed compilation: Donoghue presents a story introduced with a specific city and year, then gives the ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ historical background that both explains and enhances her fictionalized narrative. Each is part of a centuries-old immigration journey, grouped together in three sections: “Departures,” “In Transit,” and “Arrivals and Aftermaths,” and in the final ”Afterword,” Donoghue – herself Irish-born, British PhDed, currently Canada-domiciled – explains “why, on and off, for the last decade and a half, I’ve been writing stories about travels to, within, and occasionally from the United States and Canada.” [If you choose the audible version, you'll get a full cast of effective narrators, but the best reward comes at the end when you get to hear Donoghue herself read the "Afterword" – that leftover lilt is just soooo inviting.]

Like Donoghue who has “gone stray, stepped off some invisible track [she] was meant to follow,” her characters begin in one place and are driven out, run away, move to, or search out somewhere else. In “Man and Boy,” two “self-made prodigies” are willing to accept “[w]hatever Barnum offers” – yes, as in P.T. – and prepare to sail from London in 1882 across the Atlantic toward waiting audiences. A young woman living in 1854 London in dire circumstances in “Onward” finds a surprising benefactor (I hope you’ll be as tickled as I was to learn his identity!) who offers the possibility of a reinvented life in the new world. In “Last Supper at Brown’s,” a slave and his missus flee 1864 Texas, leaving the master “facedown in the okra” (not my favorite veggie, either!).

In “Counting the Days,” plans for reunion between a waiting husband in Canada and his Irish wife and young children are tragically thwarted. A lawless woman of the Wild West captures a wayward prospector, and acting as her own “judge and jury,” decides to return him to his family with a few adventures along the way in “The Long Way Home.” In “The Gift,” a destitute new mother gives up her daughter in 1877 and spends the rest of her life trying to reclaim her. The private lives of a 1639 Cape Cod community are transgressively revealed, then recanted in “The Lost Seed.” And, in my personal favorite, “Daddy’s Girl,” a young woman learns the true identity of her father only upon his death.

Harnessing her own searching spirit, Donoghue ventures through centuries and continents, across oceans and cultures, to present a unique collection of peripatetic characters, each ready to confront, challenge, or flee what life presents next. Be assured: Going rogue never read this good.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Canadian, Irish, Nonethnic-specific

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December 18, 2012 · 12:02 pm

Mimi’s Village: And How Basic Health Care Transformed It by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes

When Mimi and her little sister Nakkissi go to fetch the family’s water from the stream one hot day, Mimi does something she knows she shouldn’t: she realizes that tired Nakkissi can’t walk all the way home without a drink, so she gives her “two handfuls of brownish water” from the stream – even knowing that the water must first be boiled before drinking. That evening, Nakkissi falls seriously ill with a sickness that too many village children don’t survive. Armed with a machete, hoe, and sticks to ward off any wild animals, the whole family walks in the middle of the night to the next village in search of help.

With simple, clean care at the health clinic, Nakkissi recovers quickly. Nurse Tela convinces the family to stay another night because the next day is vaccination day. Mimi watches and learns as Nurse Tela tends to pregnant women, babies, and many children more ill than Nakkissi. Inspired by what she sees, when they return home, Mimi shares her “big dream” with her father, who discusses it with the village elders … and three months later, that dream becomes a most welcome, necessary reality. What might have been a family tragedy proves to be healthy salvation for Mimi’s whole community.

Part of Canada’s Kids Can Press‘ compelling, informative, entertaining CitizenKid series – “books that inform children about the world and inspire them to be better global citizens” – Mimi’s Village is “based on a blend of real stories.” Author Katie Smith Milway (who also wrote CitizenKid’s uplifting, based-on-real-life The Good Garden) definitely inspires readers with a good story … and then fortifies her audience with informative context and opportunities to take action. She shares the experiences of real-life nurse Felina Maiya of Zambia, who has thus far brought saving treatment and hygienic prevention techniques to 61 households since 2006. Milway also provides the ‘why’ of the importance of simple health care (diarrhea causes one in five deaths; malaria kills a child in sub-Saharan Africa every 45 sections), and how readers can get involved (a 7-year-old Canadian boy raised the funding to build a well in Uganda!) and new ways to create change (an African superstar performs concerts that urge his fans to use bed nets to prevent malaria).

In this season of privileged plenty for so many of us lucky readers, resources like CitizenKid titles are priceless. Invest in a few (or all!) and encourage your kiddies to go global: with the help of CitizenKid, teach them now that actions speak louder than words.

Readers: Children, Middle Grade

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, African, Canadian, Nonethnic-specific

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November 24, 2012 · 9:06 am

Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees by Deborah Ellis

Bestselling Canadian anti-war activist Deborah Ellis‘s four nonfiction titles (thus far) for younger readers should be bundled together and sent to every policymaker throughout the world. Two of those four, Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War and Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak, give voice to children living in active war zones. Off to War: Voices of Soldiers’ Children features the children left behind in the United States and Canada by deployed military. Children of War looks at lives attempting to be reclaimed by surviving families who have fled a war-torn homeland for an often unwelcoming new country.

Hibba, 16: “I have nothing in common with American children. How could I? They are raised up with peace and fun and security. … We are raised with war and fear. It’s a big difference.”

Michael, 12: “I think it would make the world better if people had to fix the things they broke. Like, if someone bombs your house, they couldn’t go away and do things they wanted to do until they built you a new house and fixed what they broke.”

Sara, 15: “We all miss our homeland. We had friends there, and lives that could have been wonderful.”

Eva, 17: “Hating people is not part of our culture, but the war is sending people back to the dark ages It is destroying who we are. Iraqis love sports and literature, and poetry and science, and gardens, all good things. Iraqis don’t like all this killing.”

Iraq is a young country, gaining independence in 1932, although the civilization that originated there is one of the world’s oldest, its ancient glory buried in the hanging gardens of Babylon, its written literary history dating back over 2000 years with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Tragically, Iraq’s recent history is defined by violence and war, from the eight-year Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980, to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 which sparked the First Gulf War, to the post-9/11 U.S. invasion in 2003.

While Ellis provides important political and historical context here, Ellis’ focus is clearly on the  youngest victims: “The children in this book are mostly refugees who fled Iraq because of the war and were living in Jordan in the fall of 2007.” She chose Jordan “simply because the entry process was easier than for Syria.” Five million Iraqis were displaced by war, 3 million were unable to leave Iraq and live in remote tent camps; many of the survivors able to get out went to Jordan and Syria.

Nearly a decade has passed since Saddam Hussein was deposed. And yet the troubled nation remains in the headlines for the seemingly unending sectarian violence. The majority of those surviving children are no more, having grown into troubled adulthood. What now? What now?

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2009

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November 18, 2012 · 9:58 am

Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak by Deborah Ellis

Given the latest headlines in the Middle East, this seems to be the perfect time for another Deborah Ellis title. Best known for her Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City) which became a tetrology this fall with My Name is Parvana, Ellis is an award-winning Canadian author whose international anti-war activism has given fierce power to her titles; she’s also parlayed her bestselling success to raise over a million dollars in royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International with the first three Breadwinner titles alone.

While Ellis’ nonfiction titles for younger readers definitely reflect her anti-war beliefs, she doesn’t lecture or preach. Instead, she gives voice to the children who are living in war zones (Three Wishes, Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War), in refugee areas (Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees), and in the left-behind homes of deployed military personnel (Off to War: Voices of Soldiers’ Children). Read together, the message is loud and clear: no one suffers more than the children. The foursome should be bundled together and sent to every policymaker throughout the world.

“In World War I, 15 percent of all casualties were civilians. In World War II, 50 percent of all casualties were civilians. In 2004, 90 percent of all casualties in war are civilians,” the epigraph stuns. Over six pages that follow, Ellis lists the names and ages of the 429 children who were killed between September 29, 2000 (the onset of the Second Intifada) and March 7, 2003.

In “a very small piece of land on the Mediterranean Sea,” Ellis writes in her introduction, “… a land sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians … the area has been at war for more than fifty years”: “The ongoing fight over this land means the children who live there spend their lives in a place of constant war.” In 2002, Ellis traveled to Israel and Palestine to speak to some of these children. Unless you recognize a name, can you really tell which ‘side’ these children are on?

Nora, 12: “I’m not supposed to go out by myself because my mother thinks I won’t be able to move fast enough if the soldiers come.”

Mona, 11: “I just want to go to school.”

Yanal, 14: “Being religious, whether you are Muslim or Christian or Jewish, or whatever you are, means that you should help people, and make the world better, and not just think of yourself. We have these things in common, at least in our religions.”

Maryam, 11: “I have only one wish. I would like to go to heaven. Maybe in heaven there is happiness, after we die. Maybe then.”

Elisheva, 18: “We could have lived like neighbors, and we did for awhile. We went to their weddings and feasts, and they came to ours. I remember when I was little we would go to their parties, and they were always friendly and welcoming. All of that has changed. Now we don’t know who we can trust.”

Hassan, 18: I would like to be a policeman when I get older. I would be a good policeman. People would trust me, and I would keep them safe.”

Yibaneh, 18: “God has become unclear. He’s heading somewhere, but it’s hard to see how this will all come to a good end.”

Asif, 15: “When I’m eighteen, I’ll go into the army. It’s the law for three years. … If I’m given an order I don’t like, an order to do something I think is wrong, I will refuse to do it. It’s important to protect the people, protect the Palestinians, I mean. I want to be a moral voice in the army …”

Mai, 18: “But now this wall is being built between us and them, and that will make it even harder for us to get to know each other as human beings. I don’t see God in this anywhere at all. I’ve never believed in God. We will make our own peace, just as we made our own war.”

Out of the mouth of babes … listen and learn. Peace, too, can be a choice.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2004

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October 15, 2012 · 11:27 am

Requiem by Frances Itani

While I can hardly estimate the many, many books I’ve read about the Japanese American experience during World War II, I know few details about what happened to Japanese Canadians. The lone fact that looms is that like their Japanese American counterparts on the West Coast, more than 20,000 Japanese Canadians along Canada’s west coast were also rounded up and imprisoned without cause to harsh camps. The one title I’ve read that puts a face to the unjust experiences of our northern neighbors is the modern classic, Obasan (and its middle grade version, Naomi’s Road) by Joy Kogawa. Until now …

Intentional or not, Frances Itani – whose best-known title, Deafening, won the 2004 Commonwealth Book Prize for Best Book (Caribbean and Canada) among numerous other honors – seems to be channeling Kogawa in her Requiem. In my own reading (alternating with Brian Nishii’s excellent narration stuck in my ears when the book was not in hand), Auntie Aya’s appearance in Itani’s latest provided the initial trigger: the eponymous Obasan in Kogawa’s autobiographical novel is also an Aunt Aya, whose full name is Ayako Nakane. Both titles also share a counterpoint structure, shifting between the defining events of World War II and a contemporary examination of things past.

At the risk of committing literary heresy, Requiem is the better novel. I pause for a moment in anticipation of the roaring objections to come …

Bin Okuma – who throughout his life has also answered to Oda Binosuke, Okuma Binosuke, Bin Oda, Ben Okuma – is newly widowed, his beloved wife having suddenly died of a stroke at just 49. Lena was the historian, the one who pieced together Bin’s family story, even as he tried to bury his anger, his melancholy, his unresolved mourning. Loading the car with the family dog Basil – quite the character in his own right – Bin literally journeys into his past, driving through his Canadian homeland, seeking the remote prison camp where he spent four years of his childhood, where his family was splintered and remade, where he might finally confront the man he calls “First Father.”

So aptly titled, Itani creates a resonating symphony of intertwined lives – separating, flowing, diverging, merging. Even as she captures moments of inexplicable violence (a father scarring his son with a careless toss), of systematic betrayal (reducing a man’s worth to just $18.85 for nothing more than the randomness of his ancestry), of shocking tragedy (a family giving away an extra son), Itani always remains in subtle control, modulating each detail with careful mastery.

Dare I say … the result warrants a (tear-stained, breath-taking) ovation.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2011 (Canada), 2012 (United States)

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September 20, 2012 · 10:04 am

My Name is Parvana by Deborah Ellis

What delighted anticipation I felt when I heard that Deborah Ellis‘ multi-award-winning Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City), after almost a decade since its completion, was becoming a tetrology! I adamantly hoped for such at the end of my Mud City post: “Although the trilogy is seemingly finished, adding a final fourth which captures Shauzia and Parvana’s reunion would surely be welcome … “

I swear, I didn’t know a thing back then … but if the book gods are feeling ‘ask-and-you-shall-receive’-sort of generous right about now, might I put forth a request that an octology might be in order for the future? If I’m gonna ask, I might as well ask big!

Parvana is 15, and a prisoner who refuses to speak to the American soldiers who question, frighten, even threaten her. Found alone in the bombed-out rubble of a village school, Parvana’s interrogators insist she’s a terrorist and harass her day and night about her involvement. In spite of her fearful silence, for the first time, Parvana has a clean room to herself; someone with a conscience recognizes she’s still a child and doesn’t throw her in with adults, while someone else has a heart and slips her food against orders. And even though her captors insist on piping in Donny Osmond’s cloying “Puppy Love” at ridiculous decibels at all hours, Parvana is still able to slip into her past, and remember her mother’s dedication to educating girls regardless of the growing threats, her fights and quibbles with her older sister Nooria and adopted brother Asif, her decision not to reveal the gatekeeper Mr. Fahir’s secret, the villagers’ chilling reactions to the opening of Leila’s Academy of Hope … and how she ended up an American prisoner.

Reading – and recalling the books she once read – helps Parvana stay sane, from the packaged food wrappers to the Robert Frost poem she remembers with longing. “Who would want to shoot somebody after reading ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’ or ‘Casey at the Bat’?,” she muses, envisioning how soldiers might stop their fighting to read each other “a great poem,” or swap chapters printed on ration wrappers with one another until whole books were pieced together. While she dreams she could be hired to choose such books, she tries hard not to think about the women who torture prisoners: “Women in the West could do anything they wanted. So why would they choose to do that?”

With still widespread social problems like child marriage and other brutality against women and girls, unpunished deaths, and references to Abu Ghraib, Parvana is a sobering read. Ellis depicts post-Taliban Afghanistan with eyes wide open, sugar-coating nothing. As foreign countries plan withdrawal from an unstable country still mired in poverty and violence, Ellis notes, “the war continues, and it is not clear who might be the winner in the end.”

While governments battle, life goes on for the Afghan people. “Individuals like Parvana, Shauzi, and Mrs. Weera are working to make life better. They, and the many many Afghan women, men, and children like them, are the ones the world needs to support. We owe it to them.” Ellis’s own support is especially inspiring: she’s raised over a million dollars in royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International with the first three Breadwinner titles alone. As Parvana’s story continues, imagine how a few more titles will add to Ellis’ golden giving pot!

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2012

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September 7, 2012 · 2:36 pm

Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War by Deborah Ellis

Mega-award-winning author Deborah Ellis‘s active interest in Afghanistan began in 1996 when she heard about the Taliban takeover of that country “and the crimes they perpetrated against women and girls.” She became involved with the Afghan communities in her native Canada, then traveled to meet Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Russia, and most recently returned to Kabul just last year. In a land ravaged by decades of neverending war, “[t]he real losers are the Afghan people, especially the women and children.”

By giving voice to the Afghan community in numerous books – Women of the Afghan War for adults, and the ever-popular middle grade/young adult Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City) – Ellis has single-handedly raised over a million dollars in book royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International. Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan benefits again with all royalties from Kids in Kabul, Ellis’ latest title. [Take note: be patient a little longer ... that memorable Breadwinner trilogy is about to grow, with a brand new sequel, My Name Is Parvana, hitting U.S. shelves next month!]

Post-9/11, Afghanistan remains a war zone; even after the Taliban government was officially ousted, the Afghan people have not had peace for the past 11 years. “The billions and billions spent on the war, which might have been spent on education, health care, housing and rebuilding a civil society, have been spent on weapons,” Ellis soberly writes in her “Introduction.” Although more than half of Afghan children don’t have access to education, they’re making every effort to better their lives, as best as they can amidst violence, corruption, repression, and worse. Ellis traveled for a week in Kabul (because of security reasons, she couldn’t move beyond the dangerous capital) in early 2011 to talk to children.

The 27  girls and boys included here range from ages 11 to 17, most with photographs revealing their thoughtful young faces (which, I admit, makes me worry about their safety now that they are so easily identifiable). Each of their stories is introduced with relevant, contextual, cultural details from Ellis’ sharp observations. Most of the children are fatherless, many are orphans. Some are going to school, some will never have the chance. All have survived horrors no child should, including watching loved ones murdered, the brutality of child marriage, loss of home, safety, basic rights, even limbs.

“I want to be a doctor, of course. This the dream of many Afghans because we have seen so much death and suffering,” says 16-year-old Aman.

“At school I have learned that there are better ways to do things than all this war, war, war all the time. It’s the younger generation that will change that. My generation. Me,” says Mustala, 13.

“Sometimes we play on the big field at the stadium, the same stadium the Taliban used for all the terrible things they did – the shootings, cutting of people’s hands, the executions and torture. When we play there … it is like getting some justice for all those women who were hurt. We play for them as much as ourselves,” says 16-year-old Palwasha.

“I am happiest when I am in this library. All of our problems can be solved with these books,” says Sigrullah, 14.

Against challenging, sometime inhumane conditions, these children manage to thrive: “It is good to be hopeful,” Ellis reminds, “and if the future could be in the hands of this generation of young people, with their eagerness, openness and determination, then Afghanistan could indeed be a garden again.”

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2012

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