Category Archives: young adult

July 8, 2025 · 5:35 pm

Ghady and Rawan: Epistolary Middle Grade Fiction with Heart

Ghady and Rawan, by Fatima Sharafeddine and Samar Mahfouz Barraj, trans. Sawad Hussain and M. Lynx Qualey (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UT Austin, 2019, 129 pp, grades 7-9)

Ghady & Rawan is a sweet story about two Lebanese thirteen-year-olds, but their experiences resonate with me, the mother of a not-so-long-ago middle schooler in America. Ghady in Brussels and Rawan in Beirut each face their own struggles. Their e-mail correspondence and their local friendship circles sustain them through bullying, family troubles, prejudice, and the challenges of moving between worlds.

Ghady’s family lives in Brussels, Belgium, but he loves the summers they spend in Beirut with extended family and his friends, Rawan and Jad. Back in Brussels for his eighth grade year, Ghady discovers that his new friend, Thomas, has been hanging out with the class bully, Michael.

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July 3, 2025 · 5:45 pm

I Want Golden Eyes: Futuristic YA Sci-Fi from the Middle East

I Want Golden Eyes, by Maria Dadouch, trans. M. Lynx Qualey and Sawad Hussain (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Austin, 2025, 184 pp, ages 12-18)

In the year 2095, Quartzia is a sharply segregated city in which the majority of citizens—the Limited—live underground, in the Burrow. The privileged ruling class—the Goldens—live above ground in a city of quartz domes.

Supposedly, the factor that determines who lives where is IQ—whether one scores above or below 1111 at birth. Protagonist Diyala, however, uncovers suggestions that other factors are involved in the distribution of assets. Also tellingly, the Limiteds are forbidden to read; it turns out that reading raises one’s IQ.

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June 18, 2025 · 8:12 pm

Books for World Refugee Day: Arvo Pärt and Uri Shulevitz

June 20 was designated World Refugee Day (WRD) in 2001, in recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of a United Nations convention on refugees organized in 1951. The intent of the original conference was to define who qualifies as a refugee and to delineate the rights of asylum seekers. WRD is an opportunity to raise awareness of the needs of displaced person both worldwide and in our communities.

Few people leave their homes, extended families, and the place that represents their cultural and linguistic heritage unless compelled by poverty or persecution. As citizens of an essentially prosperous country, we have the opportunity to touch the world by assisting its representatives who live among us. A number of well-established organizations in the U.S. coordinate services to refugees and opportunities for volunteers. Here in Eugene, Oregon, the Refugee Resettlement Coalition of Lane County partners with Catholic Community Services to support refugees and immigrants. (Click here for more information.)

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October 22, 2024 · 11:59 pm

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa

This book satisfied me on many levels, although member reviews from our mother-daughter book club were mixed. Several felt the story lines in parts I and II were excessively disconnected from each other. And while my seventeen-year-old enjoyed the plot and secondary characters, she found the main protagonist unrelatable.

I concluded Yagisawa most likely wrote with two potential audiences in mind. One is a young generation of non-readers like protagonist Takako, whom he hopes to draw in with romantic tension and retain with efficient storytelling, ultimately infecting them with the love of books Takako discovers. The other potential readership is established book lovers attracted by the setting—Tokyo’s book town, Jimbocho—and will resonate with the many virtues and pleasures of reading inscribed in the story.

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September 17, 2024 · 5:11 pm

Small Mercies, by Bridget Krone

Our Mother-Daughter Book Club picked this title in part because one of our members is South African. It turned out to be our first selection in quite some time that every member read to completion. It charmed us all, as well as offering plenty of fodder for discussion.

Eleven-year-old Mercy lives with the rather senior sisters Flora and Mary. They aren’t actually aunts, but they function that way. The reasons for Mercy’s residency with them are a bit murky at first, but they emerge as the story progresses.

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September 3, 2024 · 6:58 pm

Darius the Great Is Not Okay, by Adib Khorram

A couple of years ago my daughter, then fifteen, read this book (twice, I think). She promised I would love it too. I finally got around to it, and she was right. I do–for so many reasons.

To start with, the plot spans Portland, Oregon, and Iran. Twenty-five-and-some years ago Persian language brought my husband and me together in Portland; we still live in Oregon. We later spent two years in the Persian-speaking country of Tajikistan, during which time we were able to travel for a week in Iran. It was the trip of a lifetime (we still hope to go back someday).

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December 18, 2023 · 10:42 pm

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

I Capture the Castle (1948) came to my attention as a novel recommended for aspiring writers. The Austenesque plot features a quirky, down-on-their-luck British family in the 1930s. A thwarted novelist father languishes at the helm while the oldest daughter pursues a loveless marriage to save the family fortunes. Her intended is the wealthy young heir of a nearby estate.

The heir has recently returned from America with his brother, who is enamored with the American West. Thus the narrative straddles not only the 19th and 20th centuries but the Atlantic Ocean, flanked by British venerability on one side and American innovation on the other.

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October 11, 2023 · 12:58 am

Love and Assassins: The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, by Daniel Nayeri

This is a love story. Or so claims Omar, the teller of this tale. Notwithstanding the mention of dreams, one might object to invoking assassination and commerce in the title of a romance. The Many Assassinations of Samir the Seller of Dreams is, nevertheless, a love story of sorts. Not in the way one might expect. But much about Daniel Nayeri’s difficult-to-class novel betrayed my expectations.

Prompted by the title, I anticipated a picaresque tale á la The Music Man; as narrator, an eleventh-century Harold Hill peddling a medieval brand of positive thinking along the Silk Road. Instead, the story opens with the orphan Omar’s description of “the first time [I] was stoned to death.” He goes on to describe how the eponymous Samir buys and thus rescues him from a mob of outraged monks.

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February 17, 2023 · 6:01 pm

A Wealth of Wit in a Straw House

Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad Is Untrue enthralled me when, early in 2021, I happened upon his meandering boyhood memoir of faith and family history. (Click here for that review.) Personal connections with the Persian speaking world heightened my interest in his account of his mother’s conversion to Christianity and their subsequent flight to the West. But more than regional interest engaged me.

Nayeri’s prose disclosed hope and humor in the grimmest of circumstances. My husband had just been diagnosed with cancer, and the pandemic was still in full force. Upon reading the final page of Everything Sad—the same day I started it—I went searching for more of Nayer’s work.

But aside from a few early reader chapter books, I found only the 2011 edition of Straw House, Wood House, Brick House, Blow. Alas for me, I dismissed the collection of four novellas as unpromising, based on the spurious statistic of Amazon reviews (a mere twenty-five). But when Candlewick re-released the title in 2022 I decided it might merit further investigation. It did—and does.

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January 13, 2023 · 1:19 am

A Winter’s Promise, by Christelle Dabos

Two days after Christmas found me in a decided post-holiday slump. Inclement weather had foiled our holiday travel plans (along with those of half of North America), and we were home alone with a stretch of gray, unplanned days before us. Independent sources had recently recommended The Mirror Visitor Quartet to both my daughter and me. Since A Winter’s Promise offered the–well, promising–prospect of light, atmospheric, wintry fantasy, I ventured in.

The opening pages checked all a book-lover’s boxes: A young woman emerges from a wardrobe (well, a mirror in a wardrobe) into an archive housed in a bad-tempered old building. For added enchantment, the heroine, Ophelia, is a museum curator and wears a scarf possessed of its own animating spirit.

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