Mud City

Deborah Ellis's Mud City is a story for 10 year olds about a stubborn girl who's saving every coin she earns to get to the sea, and then to France.

What happens

This one belongs to Shauzia, Parvana's best friend from The Breadwinner. She's living in a refugee camp in Pakistan now, in a compound for widows and their children run by the very bossy Mrs Weera.

Shauzia can't stand it. It's baking hot, everything is made of mud and the little ones won't stop asking for her wolf story (it gains another wolf every time she tells it).

What she wants is a field of purple lavender in France. She keeps a magazine picture of it close. So one night she cuts off her hair, puts her boy's clothes back on and walks out of the camp with Jasper, her shepherd dog.

In Peshawar she takes any work she can find. She cleans a butcher's shop, carries trays of tea and lugs bags at the station for tips. Every roupee goes into a pouch round her neck. Is it enough for a train ticket to the sea? Not even close.

She's prickly, proud and funny without meaning to be. She shouts at people who are trying to help her, then cries into Jasper's fur where nobody can see. It's hard not to root for her.

Jasper is the heart of it. He trembles at the traffic, sniffs out food in the rubbish and lies across her like a blanket after a bad night. Any child who loves a dog will love him.

It's worth knowing that this is a tough read in places. Shauzia sleeps on the street, and one night men grab at her in the dark until Jasper drives them off. A boy she meets talks about a child who was taken by men, badly hurt and later died. There's real hunger and begging too.

A sensitive child might want a grown-up close by for those bits. For a reader who's ready, Shauzia's stubborn hope stops it ever feeling bleak. It carries on from The Breadwinner, so that's the place to start if they haven't read it.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Welcome to Nowhere has another child with big money plans and a war closing in. Omar sells postcards to tourists in Syria and keeps his savings in a plastic bag under his mattress, all for a donkey business that'll make him rich.