The Breadwinner

Parvana is eleven years old in Taliban-controlled Kabul when her father is arrested and taken away. Without a man in the family, her mother and sisters cannot leave the house — they will starve. So Parvana cuts her hair, puts on her dead brother's clothes, and goes out into the city as a boy. Ellis spent years interviewing Afghan women and girls in Pakistani refugee camps before writing this book, and the proceeds fund literacy programs for Afghan women — the integrity of the research is continuous with the integrity of the act. A dispatch from inside a gender system so extreme it makes its own logic visible — and a girl who finds, inside that system, the exact amount of courage the situation requires. The most important middle grade novel about Afghanistan and one of the most important about what girls do when the rules of the world are designed to make them disappear.