Title: A Thousand Questions
Author: Saadia Faruqi
Genre: realistic fiction
Similar books: Pop Flies, Robo-Pets, and Other Disasters by Suzanne Kamata
Extra Credit by Andrew Clements
Rating:
Summary (provided by publisher): Mimi is not thrilled to be spending her summer in Karachi, Pakistan, with grandparents she’s never met. Secretly, she wishes to find her long-absent father, and plans to write to him in her beautiful new journal.
The cook’s daughter, Sakina, still hasn’t told her parents that she’ll be accepted to school only if she can improve her English test score—but then, how could her family possibly afford to lose the money she earns working with her Abba in a rich family’s kitchen?
Although the girls seem totally incompatible at first, as the summer goes on, Sakina and Mimi realize that they have plenty in common—and that they each need the other to get what they want most.
My opinion: The set up here is one we don't often see in middle grade fiction - a child visiting her mother's homeland for the first time, experiencing a vastly different culture, feeling like an outsider while also feeling like she should understand it better. We get culture clash paired with degrees of class since Mimi and her mother are, by American standards, low income while her grandparents are, by any standards, wealthy. Then we meet Sakina who lives in poverty. So Mimi learns to recognize her own privilege while Sakina also gets a bit of a lesson about assumptions of another culture. We get a simple presentation of the responsibility of the "haves" to the rest of the world. We're also confronted with openly corrupt politics and the complexities of relationships with parents. Most interesting is the ending. Unlike most books for this age group this plot doesn't tie up all of the loose ends. It's more of a snapshot, the events that happen while Mimi and her mother are in Pakistan. A few plot points get resolved but most do not. We're left to draw our own conclusions, making this a great choice for book clubs.
Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley
No comments:
Post a Comment