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A review by jennybeastie
A Thousand Questions by Saadia Faruqi
4.0
Mimi and her mother journey to Karachi, Pakistan to visit her grandparents for the summer. Mimi is missing her long-gone father and makes friends with Sakina, the daughter of the cook. Sakina wants desperately to go to school and needs a better grade on the English portion of an admissions test, and a friendship is born.
This book does a fabulous job with the two points of view -- Mimi's very American perspective, and Sakina's Pakistani one -- they are able to comment on, be puzzled by and work out the many cultural differences they encounter on their road to friendship, and that is a beautiful journey. As an American reader, there are many hard realities to accept in the book about the education of children and the scale of poverty worldwide -- we have plenty of our own, but it presents a different face here. Both of the girls are great characters and the story is well written and entertaining.
This book does a fabulous job with the two points of view -- Mimi's very American perspective, and Sakina's Pakistani one -- they are able to comment on, be puzzled by and work out the many cultural differences they encounter on their road to friendship, and that is a beautiful journey. As an American reader, there are many hard realities to accept in the book about the education of children and the scale of poverty worldwide -- we have plenty of our own, but it presents a different face here. Both of the girls are great characters and the story is well written and entertaining.