Well-told through appealing characters, this tale sheds light from a unique cultural perspective on the link between vastly...
Obayda’s family moved to a rural village after a Kabul bomb blast took her father’s leg and the family’s livelihood; in a bid to attract good fortune, relatives persuade her mother to transform Obayda, 10, youngest of four daughters, into a bacha posh: a boy.
Her mother adopts this traditional, underground practice reluctantly. Obayda’s apprehensive but wants to help: her father was injured getting her medicine. Transformed by a haircut, boy attire, and new name—Obayd—she joins the boys’ class at school. After a rocky start, she makes friends and discovers the joys of wearing pants; exempted from chores, she plays and climbs trees. Catapulted from youngest daughter to only son, she’s served meat while her sisters get sauce and vegetables. Freedom’s intoxicating, but at puberty she’ll become a girl again—this time for good. Rahima, the central character of the Afghan-American author’s similarly themed novel for adults, The Pearl that Broke Its Shell (2014), returns here. Given vast inequities between the sexes, bacha posh (variants exist elsewhere, too) injects cultural flexibility. Yet despite its utility (a pre-pubescent son can work, helping to support the family; a girl cannot), bacha posh may leave psychological and emotional scars, issues Hashimi touches on gently.
Well-told through appealing characters, this tale sheds light from a unique cultural perspective on the link between vastly different, rigidly enforced roles for boys and girls and gender-identity issues. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-242190-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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