Kiss the Dust

Elizabeth Laird's Kiss the Dust is a gripping, serious story for 11 year olds about a Kurdish girl whose ordinary life in Iraq comes apart in a single afternoon.

What happens

It's spring 1984 in Sulaimaniya. Tara is nearly thirteen. She's walking home from school with her best friend Leila, being tested on irregular English verbs (she's hopeless at them) and planning to buy crayons for her little sister, who's off sick with chicken pox.

Then two army jeeps screech up outside the mosque.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

What Tara sees next happens in the very first chapter. Soldiers grab four teenage boys who've been reading a paper aloud. One of them is shot dead in the street, and the mullah who runs out to stop it is wounded. It's told plainly, and it stays with Tara (and probably with your reader too). There's more blood later when her uncle turns up with a gunshot wound, and he talks about ambushes in the mountains.

So this isn't one for a child who is easily upset by violence. For a thoughtful reader who's ready for it, it's very powerful.

That night a wounded man slips into their garden. He's Uncle Rostam, a pesh murga fighter Tara barely knew existed. Suddenly she's scrubbing blood off the brand-new kitchen floor in case the secret police come knocking. Soon she finds out that her quiet, respectable father has been helping the fighters for years.

What makes it so readable is how real Tara is. She flares up at Leila (who's Arab) and then realises she's being horribly unfair. She's cross that Granny thinks girls should learn to cook rather than study. Her big brother Ashti can't wait to go off and fight, and her mum can't bear the thought.

Who can you trust when anyone might be listening? That question hangs over everything, and Tara has to grow up very fast to answer it.

It's a story about a real place and a real war, seen through the eyes of a girl who just wanted to pass her exams. Your reader will probably come away with a LOT of questions, which is no bad thing.

What to read next

Elizabeth Laird also wrote Welcome to Nowhere. Omar lives in Bosra in Syria, sells postcards to tourists at the Roman ruins and dreams of getting rich. Then one morning he hears his parents whispering about something they haven't told the children yet.