Title: A Tousand Questions
Author: Saadia Faruqi
Rating Out of 5: 4 (Really good read!)
My Bookshelves: Children, Contemporary
Pace: Medium
Format: Novel
Year: 2020

What an incredibly, incredibly beautiful story. I mean, everything about this is impossible not to love. The building of the friendship alone in this was beautiful. We, the world, need more tales of friendships and girl-love. About being women and girls who want to support one another and love each other for everything that we are. And the fact that this is all in a children’s book? So much happiness and pride.

Sakina and Mimi are such wonderfully sweet children. I read a lot, absorb a lot of media, so a story in which children are genuinely just children? Very enjoyable. Honestly, Sakina and Mimi are just so wonderfully sweet that I wanted to give them a big mumma hug. Both girls had their own issues, but, ultimately, even with culture, country and social status to separate them, they find a way to become friends.

This is definitely a story that I look forward to sharing with my daughter – it’s a wonderfully heartfelt story about friendship. But it’s also a reminder that at the run of it all children are the same. It’s the crap that we pile on them that can cause the whole “us vs them” attitude. It’s such a beautiful outlook and honestly, every moment of this left me with a huge smile on my face.

I’ve never read anything set in Pakistan, my entire knowledge of the country is that it’s, well, a country. I love that this tale was written by a woman who grew up in the very city in which it was set. That all of the differences, but more importantly, the similarities between Faruqi’s life in Pakistan and the USA are highlighted. A truly beautiful novel that I look forward to reading again and again.

<- A Place at the Table

Yusef Azeem is Not a Hero ->

Image source: Booktopia