Teenage Amal Decides to Wear HijabCorrection: it's for anyone who doesn't want to belong. For anyone who wants to look only so unappealing. And this, naturally, is what the PC advocates who now seem to be running Scholastic want to promote for girls and other child readers everywhere. Bleah.
Shelley Boettcher, Canwest News Service
Being a teenager isn't easy at the best of times, but 16-year-old Amal has decided to do something that will complicate things further: wear a hijab full time.
Her parents and teacher try to talk her out of it - she was born and raised
in Australia - but she's made up her mind, and she doesn't want to back down.
It's not easy. First, there are the nasty girls at her new school. And there's her crush on a non-Muslim boy. Then there's her best friends: one's obsessed with her weight and the other has a bossy family.
This debut novel is funny, smart, serious, and fun. It's for anyone who's ever felt like they didn't belong.
(Calgary Herald)
Does My Head Look Big in This?
By Randa Abdel-Fattah
Scholastic, 368 pages
$20.99
Remind me to tell you someday about one of the writer Donald Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown books, which featured one story segment where the Bugs Meany bully bumped into another kid playing with a glow in the dark yo-yo under a blanket in the street, because he "thought I was an Arab"! And this was way back during the mid-1960s. Yep, even then, it seems that there was some kind of propaganda going on in children's books.
1 comment:
Tim Blair posted an alternate version of this story (http://www.timblair.net/):
"Being a teenager isn’t easy at the best of times, but 16-year-old Amal has decided to do something that will complicate things further: stop wearing her hijab.
"Her parents and brothers try to talk her out of it - she was born and raised under fundamentalist Islam - but she’s made up her mind, and she doesn’t want to back down.
"So they kill her."
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