There’s certainly something special about debut author Trent Reedy’s Words in the Dust.
Zulaikha has never dared to hope: born with a cleft palate, she is teased and shunned by the people in her small Afghan town. Her prospects for a good husband are dim even though she is a very hard worker, taking care of her family’s compound and watching after her two younger half-brothers. Her life is very hard, but despite the challenges, now that the Taliban is gone, Zulaikha feels the stirrings of hope that things may get better for her and her family –“Inshallah,” God willing. Then she meets Meena, an old friend of her late mother’s, who offers to teach her to read. And the Americans come to the village, promising not just new opportunities and dangers, but surgery to fix her face. These changes could mean a whole new life for Zulaikha, but she’s afraid to hope for too much.
The sense of place, honest and simple language, and well drawn characters Reedy has created easily combine to make Zulaikha’s story feel real. Reedy’s story is nuanced in its portrayal of a wide variety of issues and he takes pains to show both the good and the bad of most of them: the Americans’ role in Afghanistan, the Afghan people’s own views of the Taliban, the role of women in Afghan society, and the complex family dynamics of Zulaikha’s world. I was reminded many times of Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and felt grateful that, even though it’s fiction, at least someone is trying to honestly tell the stories of so many muted, ordinary Afghan girls and women.
On a broader note, Words in the Dust makes me think about how little bearing far-away conflicts in the news often have on our day to day lives; much less, I think, in the lives of kids & teens. So we have to rely on the stories of individuals’ experiences and struggles to make the empathic connection between a nameless, faceless “them” and “us.” If a writer does his/her job well, that connection is immediate, lasting, and makes you wonder, whenever you get news of that distant place, how the person you’ve come to care about is being affected by what’s going on. And, even more important, how much that person is just like you or me: feeling pain, hope, fear, insecurity, and love.
Words in the Dust packs many themes and topics for conversation into its 268 pages, all of which are deftly handled in a gentle, genuine, heartfelt and often heartbreaking way. The reader can simply be swept up in Zulaikha’s story of courage and survival without realizing the depth and impact of the book until you’re finished reading. Then you breathe deeply and say “wow.”
- Posted by Cori
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