Saadia Faruqi

Wow, this one is pretty powerful, told in two different timelines:
one with Yusuf, a newly minted middle schooler in 2021, and with Yusuf reading his uncle's journal written in 2001 around the 9/11 attacks.
Along with being a new middle schooler and all that entails, Yusuf is being bullied for his ethnicity and religion. His entire small Texas town is also experiencing heightened tensions around the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Preparing for a robotics competition is also prominent in the storyline. One horrible event (based on a true-life event and which I was reminded of when reading this book) brought me to tears remembering the injustice.… (mais)

Maha isn't looking forward to being her grandmother's "babysitter" when Dadi leaves Pakistan to live with the family in Texas. Maha is more interested in pursuing her passion to be a journalist, and her media class at school may help. Dadi is grumpy, a bit judgmental, and probably lonely with everyone out of the house at school or work. When Dadi begins sharing stories about Partition and the trauma she witnessed, Maha realizes Dadi's stories and those of the South Asian elders at the senior center could form a documentary subject for her media class. It's very likely young readers will learn about Partition for the first time in this book. The author does well presenting the basics of this long-ago history and making it relevant for the audience.… (mais)

When 11-year-old Houston native Mimi Scotts lands with her mother in Karachi, Pakistan, for summer vacation, she’s not sure what to expect—especially from her Pakistani grandparents, whom she is meeting for the first time.

Mimi’s mother grows increasingly distracted and distant as she navigates the fallout of her failed marriage to Mimi’s White father. Mimi grounds herself by writing to her estranged father in her journal. Although most servants in Mimi’s grandparents’ enormous house are excited about the American arrivals, Sakina Ejaz, a girl Mimi’s age who works as an assistant to her head cook father, couldn’t care less. Between her family’s poverty and her father’s diabetes, she has enough to worry about. But when Mimi agrees to help Sakina pass an English exam to achieve her dream of earning a scholarship and attending school for the first time, the two strike up a friendship greater than the differences in class and nationality that divide them. Together, they weather Mimi’s family secrets, Sakina’s pursuit of her dreams, and the sometimes-violent lead-up to an upcoming election. Faruqi’s descriptions of modern Karachi are rich with sensory detail, and her exploration of Mimi’s complicated feelings about her father make for a beautifully layered character arc. Sakina, however, feels defined almost entirely by her poverty, flattening her story and making her character’s development less satisfying.

A thoughtful portrait of friendship across class lines in modern Pakistan. (Fiction. 9-14)

-Kirkus Review… (mais)