Tag 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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September 4, 2024 · 7:27 pm

Sugar Birds, by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

Sugar Birds was an atypical reading choice for me on several counts, but its convergence of birds, faith, and neurodiversity piqued my interest. Though I don’t read many fiction titles from Christian publishers, I keep an eye on them, and few, it seems, are written by naturalists or feature neurodivergent characters.

An added attraction for me was the Pacific Northwest setting. Astute descriptions of the natural world merit one endorser’s invocation of Annie Dillard. Bostrom, a poet, delivers Craftsman-style prose–clean, flowing lines, artful but free of excessive ornamentation.

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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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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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June 4, 2022 · 7:17 pm

The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende

The movie version of The Neverending Story was first introduced to me in the late 1980s by Anja, the German exchange student who lived with us during my junior year in high school. I didn’t realize at the time–though I should have–that the book behind the movie was originally written in German. And it wasn’t until my South African mom friend gave copies of the book to our mother-daughter book club this past Christmas that I acquainted myself with Ende’s now-classic 1979 work.

Confession: I didn’t love this book, though not for any easily identifiable reason. I didn’t find it objectionable. I simply suspect that, like Geoge MacDonald’s Phantastes, the somewhat meandering and seemingly haphazard nature of the narrative (particularly in part II) didn’t hold my interest.

However, I did love the discussion Ende’s novel engendered in our mother-daughter book club. The layered symbolism, moral dilemmas, and sometimes puzzling plot provide much to ponder, question, and debate. Given that The Neverending Story originated in the land of philosophers and fairytales, its success on these points isn’t too surprising.

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January 26, 2022 · 9:04 pm

D, by Michel Faber

The hidden-picture nature of this engaging middle-grade novel accounts for some portion of its appeal: Can you spot the echoes of Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Lewis Carroll, and J.K. Rowling? (Not to mention a host of others with whom I’m likely unacquainted. Literary influences cited by the author alerted me to The Wonderful O, by James Thurber, which I plan to investigate soon.)

D’s protagonist, Dhikhilo, is the adopted daughter of a British couple who make limited appearances in the narrative. The fact that Dhikhilo is born in Somaliland and the presence of immigrants and travelers in her seaside town introduce a diversity theme that carries over into the fantasy realm of Liminus.

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January 13, 2022 · 8:34 pm

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, Part II

Like Remains of the Day, Klara rolls along at a steady pace, without extremes of suspense or drama. Nevertheless, the looming potential for tragedy and an emotional investment in the complex characters sustains reader interest.

My husband found the ending disappointingly anticlimactic and open-ended. I concede the point, although I appreciated the artful exploration of themes and questions—human relationships, the nature of belief, what constitutes identity. Certainly no fiction writer worth the paper her book is printed on would admit to smuggling a message into its pages. But if Ishiguro puts forth any discernable proposition it is this: that the love other people bear us is what constitutes the immortal essence of our being. Such a notion inevitably raises—and certainly intends to raise—further questions.

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