My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman’s Story

by Latifa (Hyperion 2001)

“Latifa” (not her real name) was sixteen years old when the Taliban took over Kabul, where she lived with her parents, her sister and brother (another sister and brother having already left home), their dog, Bingo, and their canary.  Her mother was a doctor; her sister worked as a flight attendant for the national airline. Both women were forced to give up their careers, although her mother continued to treat patients secretly until she ran out of medical supplies. Latifa had just begun her entrance exams for university, hoping to follow a career in journalism. Her dreams of furthering her education were crushed as the Taliban systematically imprisoned women in their homes and chadris, making it too dangerous for them to venture out for any reason. Those women who had no male family members to run errands for them or escort them either starved in their homes or risked savage beatings and rape if they went out. (An infraction of any of the many decrees governing their behavior gave men an excuse to punish them any way they wanted.) Sick or injured women had no access to medical care, because male doctors were not permitted to treat female patients, and female doctors (the majority, before the Taliban) were not permitted to practice medicine at all. It’s difficult to imagine how any person (let alone a whole group of people) could so oppress half of the population of a country.

The book is written like a journal, mostly in the present tense; if it were not for the fact that I think it unlikely that the author could have left Afghanistan with a diary in her luggage, I would assume that that it is her actual journal, kept over a span of years between the Taliban takeover and her leaving Afghanistan for Paris, along with her parents, in 2001, to publicize the situation of Afghan women in France. While they were in Paris, the Afghan authorities apparently discovered her identity and ransacked the family apartment, making the their return impossible.

The genius of the book is its ability to make the reader feel that such a thing could actually happen to any of us. Latifa does not come across as “foreign”. Although a devout Muslim, she enjoyed all the same things that American teens enjoy; she was a good student, with hopes of a bright future. Suddenly, all that was lost. She battled boredom and then depression, until she courageously began to teach some of the children in her building in one of what must have been many clandestine “schools” set up under the noses of the Taliban. This was why she was invited to go to Paris to speak on behalf of Afghan women. At the end of the book, she is pessimistic about the response: “…I don’t think anything will change. My father, ever the optimist, keeps telling me that … a word is never lost in the desert. One day it will burst into bloom…. Women listen to other women, and what you’ve told them will make people here understand what the Taliban are doing to you. A woman is not nothing. If a talib tells a woman she is nothing and he is everything, he is ignorant. Man is born of woman, the saint has a mother, the whole world was born in the body of a woman….” (pp. 196-197) But after the news that a fatwa has been issued against them and their apartment gutted, even her father is demoralized.

The book ends in 2001, after Al Qaeda’s attack on America but before the escalation of the American war in Afghanistan. A quick Google search does not bring up updated information on whether Latifa and her parents were ever able to return to their country or whether they were ever reunited with her brothers and sisters in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States. In any case, as I write, the Taliban are still in control of parts of Afghanistan and are still presumably waging war on the women and girls of Afghanistan.

The book is simply written and would be accessible to upper-intermediate and advanced English language learners.

Faith, Hope, and Ivy June

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (2009)

This is the story of two seventh-grade Kentucky girls. Catherine lives in an upper middle class neighborhood in Lexington and attends a private academy; Ivy June lives with her grandparents outside of a mining community near Hazard. One spring, the girls participate in an exchange program. First Ivy June spends two weeks with Catherine in Lexington; two weeks later, Catherine travels to Thunder Creek to stay with Ivy June for two weeks.

In addition to the third-person narrative, Naylor lets the girls tell their stories through the diaries they are required to keep for the exchange program (printed in two different manuscript-like fonts).  Both girls are basically good people, smart and unprejudiced; but there are those in both communities ready to pre-judge the outsiders. Despite this, Catherine and Ivy June become friends; but their friendship is tested during Catherine’s visit to Ivy June as each faces a crisis of her own.

Although not as good as the Alice series, this is a simple story, well told. Girls from about ten up should like it.

Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok (Riverhead/Penguin 2010)

Kimberly Chang, the narrator of this short coming-of-age novel, has much in common with author Jean Kwok. Both immigrated to the United States  from Hong Kong; both lived in Brooklyn; both worked in a sweatshop; both graduated from top schools, making successes of themselves through sheer grit and brains.  So it is tempting to wonder how much of the novel is autobiographical: the freezing apartment in a condemned building? the roaches and mice? the full scholarship to a fancy prep school? Kimberly and her mother’s mistreatment by an unfeeling, jealous relative and their perseverance under seemingly impossible conditions make the book hard to put down (I read it in two days).  It’s impossible not to like this plucky young girl (when the book opens, she is eleven; it ends when she is eighteen and there is an epilogue that takes place twelve years later) as she resolutely develops her American self, smart and successful in school, and her Chinese self, rather more outspoken than is proper, but ready to do whatever it takes to survive and help her mother.

I enjoyed the way Kwok portrays Kimberly’s limited English by substituting what she thinks she hears people say for what they actually say, for example: the prep school headmistress tells Kimberly that although she is applying after the normal deadline, they can “make an excession for you”–possibly “up to fifty percent of the twosheen costs.” It’s a good reminder that language learners do not always hear what we think they hear!  I also loved the way Chinese idioms are translated word for word in the dialogue between people speaking Chinese, and then interpreted, for example: “Hey, someone has to find the rice, right?” To earn the money. And “he has the white disease.” She was calling Park retarded. Additionally, colorful Chinese insults are translated word for word, like “You have the nose of a pig and slits for eyes too!” These add an authentic flavor to the text.

There are several wonderful characters besides Kimberly, including her true love Matt and her best friend Annette, a Caucasian girl she has the good fortune to meet when she enrolls in public school. Annette has a pure soul and offers Kimberly true friendship, even though Kimberly finds it necessary to lie in order to hide the extent of her poverty from Annette. Annette goes on to the same prep school as Kimberly, and it is a pleasure to watch her grow from a rather naive child who cannot imagine a life so different from her own wealthy existence into an independent thinker, a political activist, a feminist, but always a true friend to Kimberly. I wonder if Kimberly would have had the strength to persevere through the years of abject poverty, bullying, and accusations of dishonesty on her road to immigrant success, had she not had the love, support, and trust of this one friend. By offering friendship to someone like Kimberly, the Annettes of this world can make a huge difference in their lives.

A Hat Full of Sky

by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins 2004)

This is my first Discworld series novel and my first Terry Pratchett. I enjoyed it, despite wishing I had started with The Color of Magic, which is the first in the series. (I prefer to read series in order.)  It tells the story of eleven-year-old Tiffany Aching (I wonder: aching, like my head is aching? Or ATCHing? or uhCHING?), going to study witchcraft under the tutelage of Miss Level (a witch who happens to have two bodies), who is invaded by something called a hiver (I kept wanting to pronounce it eeVEHR, like the French word for winter) and must fight for her life, with the help of other witches and a bunch of little blue fairies called the Nac Mac Feegle.  Said like that, it doesn’t sound very good, but I did enjoy it. It was a quick read. I might look for others in the series, but not right away.

Patience, Princess Catherine

by Carolyn Meyer.  Young Royals series.  Gulliver Books, Harcourt, Inc. 2004.

Vicki enjoys historical fiction, and we have been reading books in the Royal Diaries and Young Royals series.  Both series focus on historical princesses and queens.  In this series, we have already read Doomed Queen Anne, about Anne Boleyn.  Patience, Princess Catherine is the story of Catherine of Aragon, who at the age of fifteen traveled from Spain to England in 1501 to marry Arthur, the elder son of King Henry VII.  Arthur, a sickly young man, dies soon after their wedding, and Catherine sets her hopes on Arthur’s younger brother Henry, who was to become Henry VIII.  She waits for seven long years of humiliating treatment by Henry VII.  The title is apt, as Catherine must show great patience and will to achieve her destiny of becoming Queen of England.

Each chapter begins with a short section about the young Henry, who was six years Catherine’s junior.  This section is followed by a first-person account in Catherine’s voice.  The reader sympathizes with her plight as she stubbornly refuses to give up her goal, despite her lack of power, influence and money to support her Spanish court.  This book ends on a fairly happy note. although the Historical Note at the end tells the sad story of Henry’s eventual rejection of Catherine, whom he divorces and banishes to increasingly remote and uncomfortable residences when he decides to marry Anne Boleyn in the hope that she will provide him with a son.  Catherine, however, never agreed to the annulment of her marriage and never gave up her title of Queen of England.

Doomed Queen Anne, by the same author, tells the parallel story of Anne Boleyn’s single-minded pursuit of Henry, her determination to hold out for marriage and her belief that she could, unlike Catherine, produce a male heir to the English throne.  Instead, she gave birth to the daughter who would become Queen Elizabeth I.  After she too suffered a miscarriage, Henry quickly got rid of her and proceeded to marry four more women before he died.  He only managed to do this by breaking with the Catholic Church and making himself head of the Church of England.

This is an interesting period of English history, and Carolyn Meyer’s novels make it accessible to  readers both young and old.  Vicki and I are looking forward to reading Mary, Bloody Mary to learn about the life of Catherine’s daughter Mary, who eventually became Queen of England and restored Catholicism to England for the period of her reign.

Heidi

by Johanna Spyri

I think Heidi must be my all-time favorite children’s book, at least from those that I actually read as a child. I have three hardcover editions; my most recent acquisition is a Knopf 1987 edition illustrated by Ruth Sanderson (interestingly, the translator is not named).

I don’t know why this story of a young Swiss orphan, her grandfather, the people who dwell on the Alp with her, and those she meets when she is sent to Frankfurt as a companion for a crippled child, appeals to me so much and so consistently; but I love Heidi’s honesty and goodness. Other characters the reader cannot help loving and admiring are Heidi’s grandfather, the Alm-Uncle (or Nuncle, as he is called in one translation); young Clara Sesemann, whom Heidi is sent to Frankfurt to befriend, her father, and her grandmother; and the Frankfurt doctor who helps Heidi return to her beloved home. In addition, the characters of Peter the goatherd; Fraulein Rottenmeier, the Sesemanns’ housekeeper; and Sebastian, the butler are memorably drawn.

My favorite parts include the part where Heidi’s simple trust and intelligence win over her grandfather, who has lived for years isolated from his fellow men; the part where Clara’s Grandmamma persuades Heidi that she can, in fact, learn to read; the part where Heidi’s homesickness gets the better of her and she sleepwalks, frightening the entire household, and especially where the doctor quickly gets to the root of the problem and induces Mr. Sesemann to send her back to her grandfather; and the doctor’s and Clara’s visits to the Alm. I read and reread these and other favorite parts, never tiring of them, always finding tears in my eyes at the same moments.

I also love the descriptions of the natural beauty of the Alps and the mountain meadow where Heidi and Peter go with the goats; the mountains, plants, and animals are lovingly described. It is this natural beauty that Heidi misses in Frankfurt, as much as she misses her grandfather. Shut up in a big city house, unable to see the sky or hear the wind in the trees, served fancy food instead of the wholesome goat’s milk, cheese, and bread she was accustomed to, she actually begins to wither like a plant deprived of light and water.

When Vicki was young, I purchased the Shirley Temple movie for her, and when we began watching it together, I was delighted to see the beginning of the story unfolding exactly as it is told in the book. Imagine my horror when the movie soon diverged so completely from the story as to be unrecognizable. In the movie, Fraulein Rottenmeier, instead of the vain, foolish woman portrayed in the book, is frankly evil, bent on selling Heidi to the gypsies, and Heidi’s grandfather travels to Frankfurt and rescues Heidi in a ridiculous carriage chase through the snowy streets. I wondered, why invent such absurdities when the story is so satisfying as originally told? Despite its moralistic tone and old-fashioned piety, Heidi is a timeless treasure of children’s literature.

Harry Potter

by J. K. Rowling (Scholastic; various pub. dates); narrated by Jim Dale

In anticipation of the July 21, 2007 release of the seventh and last book in the series, I am re-reading (actually, listening to) the first six books in the series. It is my first opportunity to listen to the Jim Dale recordings in their entirety. He’s really great. Most of the characters are immediately recognizable by their voices and accents. As with many audiobooks, I appreciate the impossibility of skimming through the story too quickly. When I first read these books, I read them very fast, because the stories are so riveting; now, I am taking this opportunity to savor the stories and the language.

Rowling’s style is uncomplicated, and she moves the stories along skillfully. Reading them all together like this makes one realize that they are really all one long story; this is particularly true of books 6 and 7. At the end of book 6, the reader is given a kind of map for the last book. We already know that Harry and his friends may not be returning to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for their final year, and that they will probably spend the year chasing down and destroying the various horcruxes (shards of the evil Voldemort’s soul which he has hidden in various places to ensure his immortality).

I read recently that the Harry Potter books are “just British school stories,” as if that were a bad thing. Indeed, they are a very clever reflection of life in British boarding schools. Never having attended one of these schools, I can still imagine what they are like, based on Rowling’s description of the magical Hogwarts. Her attention to detail is formidable, and the fantastic elements are usually very clever and funny.

For English learners, the Harry Potter books have a lot of advantages and some disadvantages. Those who have already read the books in translation, or seen the movies, will find reading the novels in the original English to be less daunting than starting a novel from scratch without any background information. The frequent reference to what has gone before will give readers a solid grounding in that elusive tense, the past perfect (“At the age of one year old, Harry had somehow survived a curse from the greatest Dark sorcerer of all time…), and Rowling makes constant use of participial phrases (“‘Ignore them,’ he said, accelerating to catch up with Ron….”), which grammar books tend to treat as an after-thought but which are frequently used in English writing.

On the negative side, learners of American English will learn a lot of British expressions such as skiving off class, rounding on someone, bloke, snog…) and all learners will need to develop a vocabulary of Harry Potterisms (muggles, horcrux, quidditch, thestral, apparate and disapparate…) which will do them little good in the real world. They may have difficulty making sense of Hagrid the gamekeeper’s speech (where final consonants disappear, to is ter and you is yeh) without guidance.

Nevertheless, much useful vocabulary is presented and used over and over, so that readers who persevere will expand their vocabulary naturally and effortlessly. There is, of course, much use of dialogue, which can be helpful in improving production and comprehension of natural speech.

The main attraction of the series, however, remains the page-turning appeal of the stories. Readers who dislike fantasy in general will probably not like this series either, and it would be a mistake to expect them to; but for those readers/learners with an appreciation for the whimsical and magical, Harry Potter is hard to beat.

Addendum, after reading the last book (twice):  I thought the finale was awesome.  Like The da Vinci Code, it started fast and hardly slowed down.  V. and I read it to each other, which slowed me down somewhat (5 days instead of 2), but that is good, because left to my own devices I would have read it too fast and missed too much.  As it was, when I re-read (on audio) I noticed much that I had missed the first time through.  The complexity of the interwoven plot always amazes me.  How could J.K. keep it all straight in her mind for 10 years and 4,000 pages?

After the 6th book, we were all on  tenterhooks about whether Dumbledore was really dead or not.  In the 7th, J.K. showed us how he could be dead but still present in the novel and in the lives of Harry and the others.  Somehow, the fact that he had died ceased to matter so much.

Like one reviewer I read, I also noticed strong similarities to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  This novel of witches and sorcerers ended up with an obvious Christian allegory–what a surprise!  In fact, there were many surprises.  Rowling kept us all guessing until the last page.  What a talent!

The Alice series

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The Agony of Alice has spawned 18 sequels (the latest to be released next year) and 3 prequels. My daughter Vicki and I have been reading the books together. Both of us love them. Alice, her father and brother Lester, her best friends Pamela and Elizabeth, her first boyfriend Patrick, her sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Plotkin, her seventh-grade English teacher Miss Summers (who eventually marries her father), and others in the series seem like real people. They face real-life dilemmas and deal with them honestly. They are a great way to stimulate dialogue between mothers and daughters. They are a kind of “how-to” manual for growing up because of the wide range of issues dealt with in the various books.

The American Library Association reports that this series is one of the “most challenged”, surpassing even Harry Potter in 2003 in complaints, due to the “sexual content” of the books. Actually, the sexual content is one of the things I like most about the books, as it stimulates a lot of conversations with my daughter as we follow Alice through adolescence. By the way, “sexual content” may be somewhat of an overstatement–we are currently reading Patiently Alice, which deals with the summer between 9th and 10th grades, and there has been no explicit mention of anyone having sex! But Alice and her friends (especially Pamela) wonder about sex a lot, and if I remember correctly, so did I when I was their age, and I would have appreciated a series such as this one that answered all my questions!

We enjoy the books because they are laugh-out-loud funny. Lester always adds comic relief, and Alice herself describes her frequent blunders and faux-pas in such a forthright way that a reader cannot help laughing.

Naylor does not shy away from the hard issues of racism, bullying, death, depression, abuse, suicide, and more, yet the tone of the books is unfailingly optimistic and good-humored, as Alice picks her way through the minefield of adolescence with the unfailing support of her family, friends, and teachers.

For me, the biggest mystery is why the series is not more popular, especially in this area, since the books have a lot of local color. Alice shops at Wheaton Plaza, her father manages the Melody Inn, a music store in Silver Spring modeled after Dale Music, and Lester is a student at the University of Maryland. Yet when we visit our local library or bookstores, I find only a few of the series on the shelves. Can it be that they can’t keep them in stock?

Because the books deal unflinchingly with the issues facing a girl in public school in the U.S., they might also be of interest to adult learners of English. The language is not particularly difficult.

The Seeing Stone (Arthur Trilogy, Book 1)

by Kevin Crossley-Holland, read by Michael Maloney

During the closing months of the year 1199, the life of 13-year-old Arthur de Caldicot reflects that of the young King Arthur as the 12th-century Arthur observes scenes from the life of his namesake through a magic stone given to him by Merlin, close friend of his family.  I did not think of this as a young adult novel until I read a review of it after finishing it, but I suppose that given the age of the protagonist, it is.  I really enjoyed it.  The characters are realistic and well-drawn and the depiction of medieval life on a manor near Wales was detailed and convincing.  Maloney’s reading is excellent.

The Skull of Truth

by Bruce Coville.

Another of the Magic Shop Series, this delightful book tells the story of Charlie, who discovers the Magic Shop in the usual way (when he is chased by bullies and suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar part of town) and comes away from it with a wisecracking human skull that turns out to be that of Yorick (yes, as in “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.”). Yorick was cursed by a witch, making him unable to lie, which ultimately leads to his death; the same compulsion to speak the truth affects Charlie and anyone else in close proximity to the skull. Thus, the book examines the concept of truth and untruth, and how telling the truth can cause pain and trouble, but that it can also heal and be a very powerful force in the world. The plot is clever, and the book gives plenty to think about. Like the other Magic Shop books, it is beautifully illustrated in black and white by Gary Lippincott.