Once Upon an Eid

Once Upon an Eid brings together short stories for 9 year olds about the best day of the Muslim year, edited by Aisha Saeed and S. K. Ali.

What happens

Every story is about Eid and every one is about something else as well. That is what makes it work. The festival is the frame, and inside the frame are ordinary, recognisable problems.

The first one is a good example. Hawa is twelve, from Philadelphia, and is spending Eid in the Bronx with her father's family from Guinea instead of at the park with her best friends. She had the perfect coral outfit planned. Her great-aunt has made her a traditional one instead, and it falls straight off her when she tries to walk.

Then there is her cousin Fanta, who cooks, and glows, and is nice at Hawa in a way that makes Hawa want to scream.

It ends in a cupcake fight. An actual one, with chocolate on the walls, both Eid outfits ruined and two girls lying on a bed laughing until they cry. What comes out afterwards is that they had both been embarrassed the year before, and had both handled it badly.

Another story starts in a kitchen with the family's traditional Eid brownies, and a big sister who has decided this is the year she makes something of her own instead.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

One of the stories has a mother who is seriously ill. She is asleep in bed with no hair, the house is quiet, and the child narrating it says the happiness left some time ago, which is why she goes out on Eid morning to buy doughnuts on her own. It is written with a light hand and there is real warmth in it, but a reader with illness at home may feel it keenly.

The voices are properly different from one another, which is the pleasure of a book like this. One is all runway strut and attitude. One belongs to a boy turning up at a new neighbour's door at quarter past five in the morning to show him the shortcuts. And one is quiet and flat and keeps asking what actually makes a special day special.

Short stories are also just useful. Your reader can take one at bedtime and stop. And if a story does not suit them, there is another one along in a moment.

You do not need to know anything about Eid to follow any of it. The food, the new clothes, the presents, the visiting and the relatives you are stuck with all explain themselves.

What to read next

For more from the same writers, the airport story Grounded is stocked as well. Four Muslim children are stranded overnight when a thunderstorm cancels every flight, and one of them is meant to be watching his little sister.