Read Parvana’s Journey free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Deborah Ellis's Parvana's Journey is a story for 10 year olds about a girl crossing a country at war on her own, looking for the family she's lost.
It's the second Breadwinner book, and it starts in a very hard place. Parvana's father has just died. She kneels by his grave in a small Afghan village, laying stones around it, and there aren't enough to go all the way round.
She's thirteen now and still dressed as a boy (it's safer). Her mother, her sisters and her baby brother went north for a wedding before the Taliban took that city, and nobody knows where they are. So she packs up her father's books and sets off to find them.
She doesn't stay alone for long. In an empty, bombed village she finds a baby boy crying in the rubble and calls him Hassan. Then, in a cave by a stream, there's Asif. He has one leg, he throws stones at her and he's very, VERY rude.
Their squabbles are some of the best bits. He tells her she's far too ugly to be a boy. She won't hand over the bread until he answers her. And yet the moment she plonks a screaming Hassan in his lap, the baby goes quiet.
All the way through, Parvana writes letters to her best friend Shauzia, who's somewhere in Pakistan. That's where you hear the things she can't say out loud. In one she tries to remember how far down her back her hair used to grow. Isn't it the small things that hurt most?
She's no saint either, which makes her easy to believe. She's hungry, cross and grieving, and she tells everyone so (mostly a baby who can't answer back).
This is a sad and sometimes frightening book. It opens at a graveside, and Parvana finds Hassan beside his mother's body under a fallen roof. Asif's back is criss-crossed with scars. The village that took her in is planning to hand her to the Taliban for money, so she has to creep away in the night.
For a child who's upset by death or cruelty to children, that could be a lot. It's all told simply, though, without lingering. If your reader has already met Parvana, they'll want to be right there with her. If they haven't, The Breadwinner comes first, because this one carries straight on from it.
If they're after another girl whose whole life ends up in one bag, try A House Without Walls. Safiya is twelve, and her family's escape from Damascus includes a trek across the desert at dawn to reach the border.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
