Tag Archives: epistolary

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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October 25, 2023 · 4:26 am

The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs, edited by Diana Pavlac Glyer

As an inveterate letter writer (my e-mails all too often turn into epistles), I greeted the prospect of this collection from the Rabbit Room Press with great excitement. Not least because it promised a better acquaintance with the elder brother usually portrayed as living in C.S. Lewis’s long shadow.

And indeed, I did learn a great deal about the Major, who also served in WWI. For one, Warren Lewis was an author in his own rite having written a series of books on 17th-century France. An admittedly narrow niche, but Biggs, confessing she had expected to find the subject dry, wrote that Lewis’s treatment proved “excellent reading.”

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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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