A review by emjay2021
Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis

4.0

It’s a good novel, well written and interesting. Deborah Ellis has created an engaging, sympathetic protagonist in Parvana: she is smart and brave, but not preternaturally adult. Certainly she has had to grow up a lot faster than other children her age who don’t live in a war-torn country, but she is still clearly a child. The events in the book are realistically depicted and quite grim, but the book isn’t entirely devoid of hope. The first time I used it in a class, I did regret having timed it to come directly after the book we read about the Holocaust (Hana’s Suitcase, by Karen Levine), because it made the semester a little…relentless. However, I think Parvana’s Journey is a great teaching text. We researched the history and geography of Afghanistan, pre-and-post Taliban, and the changes that had occurred after the US declared war on the country after the September 11 bombings. That particular semester, the majority of my students were Aboriginal, and they were particularly interested in the parallels between the collectivist culture of pre-Taliban Afghan society and their own collectivist, family oriented culture. Recommended.