Books 4-6
"Gifted" by Nikita Lalwani. This is the story of a mathematically gifted Indian girl living in Wales, her father, who believes that any child can show her level of excellence with proper parenting, and her mother, who struggles with the contradictions between her husband's desire to blend in with the Welsh and their mutual desire to maintain many of the cultural and social expectations of their home culture. Although I found the story engaging enough that I was compelled to read to the end, and although I think there are many ways in which it illuminates the odd contradictions and unexpected effects of trying to live in two cultures at once, I found it ultimately to be very depressing and somewhat unsatisfying.
"Girl Made of Dust" by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi. The narrator of this story, Ruba, is a nine-year-old girl living in a Lebanese town near Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion. The story is remarkable in the way that it portrays daily life in a region where war is actively going on, and does so through the eyes of a child who is struggling to understand complex things about her family and her world. I really liked this one.
"Song for Night" by Chris Abani. This story is told from the perspective of a child-soldier, now an adolescent. While I did read through to the ending, I found that though the language is beautifully lyrical, it is also, at times, fairly unbelievable as the inner monologue of a child without formal education -- most distracting was the reference to a "plectrum" used by an old man near the end of the story. While the word is entirely accurate, and certainly the child would understand the concept of an implement used to strike the strings of an instrument, the level of diction just seemed wildly inappropriate to the speaker. Part of the issue may simply be that the entire story has an element of... almost magical realism... that seems a bit at odds with its subject matter, to me. I don't really know. Ultimately, though, I just didn't find it as believable as it could have been, for all that the story itself was engaging.
"Girl Made of Dust" by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi. The narrator of this story, Ruba, is a nine-year-old girl living in a Lebanese town near Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion. The story is remarkable in the way that it portrays daily life in a region where war is actively going on, and does so through the eyes of a child who is struggling to understand complex things about her family and her world. I really liked this one.
"Song for Night" by Chris Abani. This story is told from the perspective of a child-soldier, now an adolescent. While I did read through to the ending, I found that though the language is beautifully lyrical, it is also, at times, fairly unbelievable as the inner monologue of a child without formal education -- most distracting was the reference to a "plectrum" used by an old man near the end of the story. While the word is entirely accurate, and certainly the child would understand the concept of an implement used to strike the strings of an instrument, the level of diction just seemed wildly inappropriate to the speaker. Part of the issue may simply be that the entire story has an element of... almost magical realism... that seems a bit at odds with its subject matter, to me. I don't really know. Ultimately, though, I just didn't find it as believable as it could have been, for all that the story itself was engaging.