Looking at the Stars

Jo Cotterill's Looking at the Stars is a powerful, thought-provoking story for 10 year olds about a girl who holds on to hope by telling stories while her country falls apart.

What happens

Amina is thirteen and lives in a village called Talas. For five years the country has been ruled by the Kwana. Girls can't go to school. They have to cover their hair and can't go out without an escort. Amina's clever, chatty mouth gets her into trouble almost every day.

Then foreign soldiers roll past in trucks, smiling and waving. People call them the liberators. Amina is so happy she cheers and pulls off her headscarf to wave it in the air.

Minutes later a Kwana officer stops her in the street, pulls off her scarf in front of his friends and takes out his knife. He's only called away by a crackle on his radio.

After that, things shift in smaller, colder ways. Every family has to wear a badge with a letter on it. Soon a neighbour's house has a big black Q painted on the wall. A trader the girls have known for years suddenly offers them a quarter of the usual price for their baskets. It's because of the letter on their chests.

Through all of it, Amina tells stories. She makes up tales while she weaves reeds with her big sister Jenna. She dreams of running their own basket stall at the market (Jenna would make them, Amina would do the talking).

Amina tells it herself, so you're right there with her. You feel her fizzing excitement, then her shame, then the slow creep of fear as the grown-ups start whispering at night.

This one is not a gentle read. There's the knife in the street, talk of floggings and of protesters being shot, a young professor who simply disappears, and families being singled out by a label. Amina's father warns that things will get worse before they get better, and the book doesn't pretend otherwise.

For a sensitive child, or one who already worries about news of war, it could be a lot. But if your reader asks big questions about fairness and why people treat each other the way they do, this is the kind of book that stays with you. How do you keep dreaming when everything around you is shrinking?

What to read next

For another girl who lives half inside stories, try A Library of Lemons. Calypso would much rather read than talk to anyone, until a new girl called Mae spells out her name in twigs in the playground. (Calypso's mum has died before it begins, so it's sad in a quieter way.)