A review by eehoskins
A Thousand Questions by Saadia Faruqi

5.0

ARC from Edelweiss+

Mimi is less than thrilled when she finds out that her summer is going to be spent in Pakistan with grandparents she has never met. She is much more interested in learning about her father who left them behind so many years ago. Determined to feel some connection to him, she uses her new journal to write him letters filled with all of the questions she wants him to answer some day.

Sakina spends most of her time cooking with her abba for a rich family across town. She dreams though of being admitted to school so that she can have a future outside of a kitchen. Her test scores were all great other than English- she will have to find a way to improve before the retest and then figure out how to tell her family she wants to go to school instead of work.

After the two girls meet they soon figure out they can help one another with their dreams.

I really enjoyed this book. I think there are a lot of pre-teens and teens who have grandparents and other relatives outside of the US whom they have never met. Mimi and Sakina both felt authentic to me and I enjoyed how their characters evolved over the book.

I don't want to include spoilers here, but I will say that I think Saadia Faruqi did a great job of showing how life can be messy but still happy.