The Red Pencil

Andrea Davis Pinkney's The Red Pencil is a story told in short poems for 10 year olds about a girl in Sudan who draws in the sand.

What happens

Amira turns twelve on the first page. Old enough for a toob. Her mother whispers a birthday wish before the sun is properly up, the wheat is ready in the fields, and her father scoops her into his arms and tells her to fly.

The poems are short and the lines are shorter. Some of them are two words on their own. It looks like a thick book and it reads very fast, which is worth knowing before anyone is put off by the size of it.

Amira draws with a sharpened twig. She pushes it into the sand, pulls back in one quick strike, and there's a bird. She doesn't feel like she's the one doing it. It's her hand, her twig and her sparrow, and she never knows what they'll make.

She and her father play a game called What Else Is Possible. If your sandals go missing, don't worry about it. Somebody generous has taken them away to mend the worn edges. Perhaps they'll come back made of gold.

Then her mother takes both her hands and makes her listen properly. The Janjaweed give no warning. If they ever come here, Amira is to run.

Now the hard part, and please read this bit before you hand the book over.

They do come. The village is destroyed, and the poems do not look away from it. Amira watches her father fall. There are bullets and screams, and bodies in the sand of people who tried to run. Afterwards her voice stops working and her family walk for days to a camp made of rice bags and plastic sheeting, where her mother waits for the dark to cry.

It's not written for shock. There's no gore in it and the language stays plain. But this is a real war and real children, and a 10 year old will need you nearby.

If your reader is ready, what they'll find underneath is a girl who keeps hold of drawing and of her father's game when everything else has gone. That's a strong thing to have read.

What to read next

For another girl telling her own upheaval in short poems, In the Beautiful Country begins with Ai Shi and her mother packing up a home in Taiwan and deciding what is worth taking.