A captivating story about seeking and exposing the truth.
Fifteen-year-old British Pakistani Dua Iqbal is a passionate student journalist and determined truth-teller.
While Bodley High is undergoing construction, Dua and other Year Elevens are attending Minerva College, located in a wealthier part of town where the majority of students are White. At Minerva, Dua experiences Islamophobia and microaggressions, such as being called by another hijabi’s name in class. Meanwhile, Bodley students are subjected to harsher disciplinary treatment even as Minerva students’ transgressions are overlooked. Dua is also worried about her chemistry teacher mum, whose mental health is deteriorating, and working on her relationship with her dad, the owner of a comic-book shop. Her parents are divorced, and her mother was disowned for marrying a man from a lower caste. When she isn’t chosen for a position on the Minerva Chronicle, Dua and Liam, her White best mate, persuade Bodley principal Mohamud Aden, who is Somali, to let them create a paper focusing on Bodley students’ experiences. When it gets shut down by Mr. Aden after publishing controversial exposés about those in power, Dua and her team start an anonymous online paper. Throughout the book, Dua discovers a lot about herself—growing, changing, and mending relationships—and doesn’t back down even after receiving a vicious death threat. Khan’s gripping novel, with its upbeat and aspirational resolution, focuses on privilege, corruption, and power, interweaving details about Dua’s and her classmates’ family dynamics, relationships, and socio-economic situations.
A captivating story about seeking and exposing the truth. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5290-2994-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Paulsen recalls personal experiences that he incorporated into Hatchet (1987) and its three sequels, from savage attacks by moose and mosquitoes to watching helplessly as a heart-attack victim dies. As usual, his real adventures are every bit as vivid and hair-raising as those in his fiction, and he relates them with relish—discoursing on “The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition,” for instance: “Something that you would never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.” Specific examples follow, to prove that he knows whereof he writes. The author adds incidents from his Iditarod races, describes how he made, then learned to hunt with, bow and arrow, then closes with methods of cooking outdoors sans pots or pans. It’s a patchwork, but an entertaining one, and as likely to win him new fans as to answer questions from his old ones. (Autobiography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32650-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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