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The Breadwinner

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Life for women under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is not the stuff of which happy children's books are made. There is no happy ending here, regardless of the obstacles which are overcome, because the real-life ending has not yet come.
This book, while fiction, is the result of interviews with women who escaped from Kabul and who were living in camps in Pakistan, including one mother who disguised her daughter as a boy. The setting is true to time and place as it captures life for one family in one short period of time. (Ellis is donating the book sales to an organization dedicated to educating girls in refugee camps.)

It is a simple story, and engaging, as the reader follows the daily life of a fictional family as they struggle to survive the imprisonment of the father. His absence from the home means that they no longer have food, or communication outside the home because the female members of the family cannot go out unescorted by a male. Parvana, who is pre-adolescent, surrenders her long hair to help her family, and disguised as a boy earns a little money by selling things from their home or reading for the largely illiterate population. Thus she is able to shop for food. Her bravery is the focal point of the story and the reader is reminded of the courage and strength of children everywhere who survive against incredible odds.

Ellis has done well to write this as a story for children/young adults. While she doe not gloss over the hard parts of life in Kabul under the Taliban with executions, dismemberment, and imprisonment without a trial or a public charge neither does she dwell on them at length. Being without food or a father is hard enough for one story; living in fear adds more trauma. Everyday hardships such as the closing of school, the absence of music, and the difficulties of communication add to the realities of the story. But Ellis allows Parvana to see a Taliban soldier as human when she reads a letter for the illiterate man and watches his eyes fill with tears. To see the enemy as human is a triumph of the human spirit and gives this book its hope.

"Stay away from Afghan women or we'll kill you." Underneath was a crude drawing of a knife with blood dripping from it. This note was delivered in spring last year to Deborah Ellis who was in Peshawar, researching her book The Breadwinner. This is the story of Parvana, an eleven year old girl, who, in order to save herself and herfamily, cuts her hair short and wears the clothes of her older brother, Hossain, killed by a land mine.

Back in Toronto, Ellis paired up girls' schools in Ontario with girls' schools in the camps in Peshawar and Quetta. Funds were sent for building classrooms and establishing scholarships. In the spring and fall of 1998, Ellis visited Moscow. By this time she had begun researching the role of women in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She wanted to find out how this war, which lasted for 10 years, impacted on women from the time it started in 1979 until the present. Her book, Women of the Afghan War,published by Praeger, makes a connection between the women on both sides: the attacker and the attacked.

But the most searing indictment of conditions in Afghanistan is her most recent book, The Breadwinner. Written for children and published by Groundwood Books, The Breadwinner evolved from Ellis's conversations with refugee Afghan women and girls. There is a connection between The Breadwinner and Ellis's first book Looking for X, set in Toronto and winner of the Governor General's Award, 2000. In both books strong girl characters work out how to survive in a difficult world.

Ellis met the mother and sister of a girl in Kabul who cut off her hair, put on boy's clothes and sold things off a tray in the marketplace to support her family. "They told me a lot of girls were doing this," Ellis said. "Their fathers and brothers were killed or imprisoned, and they have to go out and earn money to support their families ."

What she heard reminded Ellis of children's enormous capacity for acts of courage when they cannot rely on the adult world. "Out of the horror of war and oppression that has been Afghanistan for the last two decades rise the voices for girls who insist on saying, 'We're still alive. We're still human. Hear us.'"

Parvana has lived for the past year and a half in one small room in Kabul with her father, mother, two sisters and baby brother. To cross this room on the third floor of a bombed out apartment building, Parvana takes ten steps one way and twelve steps the other way. The windows, in conformity with the decrees of the Taliban, are painted black - except for one window, small and high up, through which the sun's rays filter for a short period. Every day the women and children huddle together in this beam of light before it disappears.

Formerly this family, highly educated, of old respected Afghan stock, lived comfortably in a big house with a courtyard. They had a car and a couple of servants. The bombs destroyed their home and they had moved several times since then, losing more of their belongings with each subsequent bombing.

Ellis's achievement is that she has integrated within a suspenseful story the brutal conditions in Afghanistan. Every detail in her account of Parvana's family - to whom she does not give a last name, for even a fictional name can lead to terrible repercussions - is taken from first hand sources, and clandestine film footage smuggled out of Afghanistan.

The privations of this particular family are true for millions of others, especially those who live in Kabul. But, for the women and girls, who are under what amounts to house arrest, it is harder. Household chores like getting water, cooking, and caring for younger children develop into strategies for keeping alive, for keeping up one's morale.

It takes five pails of water to fill the metal drum, the family's water tank, housed in a miniscule alcove which also does duty as kitchen and lavatory. The hardship is not that there is no running water but that the women cannot fetch water from a communal tap outside. Restricted by their burquas, Parvana's mother and older sister, 17 year old Nooria, cannot negotiate the broken stairs, let alone lug a pail of water up them. The stairs were on the outside of the building, zigzagging back and forth on their way up. They had been damaged by the bomb, and didn't quite meet in places. Only some parts of the staircase had a railing... The streets, filled with potholes, are also hazardous. Women, covered from head to foot with mesh across their faces, often fall down and hurt themselves. Besides, going without a man is always dangerous.

And for those who have lost limbs it's even worse: There were a lot of false legs for sale in the market now. Since the Taliban decreed that women must stay inside, many husbands took their wives' false legs away. "You're not going anywhere, so why do you need a leg?" they asked.

Parvana's father, who is himself an amputee - he had lost the lower part of his leg during a bomb explosion - is hauled off to prison by the Taliban because he had spent time studying in England, and come back with "foreign" ideas. Reading matter, unrelated to the Qur'an, is subversive, and the Taliban, mostly illiterate, burn books they don't like. At first Parvana continues doing what her father, a history teacher, did: reading and writing letters in the market of Kabul for those who cannot read or write themselves - the majority of the population. Her university educated mother, who has been kicked out from her job as a writer at one of the radio stations, gives her things left over from the bombings to peddle at the market: dishes, bed linen, clothes.

But the family is still short of money for rent, food and fuel. While Parvana is trying to figure out how to earn more, she meets a former school mate, Shawzia, who is working as a tea boy in the market. Shawzia tells her if they have trays of their own, they can follow the crowd instead of waiting for the crowd to come to them. That way they'll make more money.

The two girls go bone-digging. They join the hordes of other children scrabbling in the churned-up earth

Accomplished actress Rita Wolf ably reads "The Breadwinner," an affecting story of childhood in a repressive land.
As difficult as it may be for those of us who live in a free country to imagine, there are parts of the world where women and girls are not allowed to leave the confines of their homes without a man, and they must wear clothing that covers every part of their bodies. A bizarre look back at some nether region? No, it is a way of life in Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

Parvana, an 11-year-old girl, lives with her family in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan during the days when the Taliban held sway. Her home is one room in a bomb damaged apartment building.

Parvana's father, a former history teacher, now earns the family's living by sitting on a blanket in the marketplace and reading correspondence for those who cannot read or write. While the pittance he earns is negligible, it is something. That is taken away when he is arrested. The charge? He has a foreign education.

Now, there is no one to earn a living for the family or even to leave the house to shop for food.

Before long it is evident there is only one solution if the family is to survive - Parvana must disguise herself as a boy and become the family's breadwinner.

Listeners will be astounded at the strength and courage displayed by Parvana and, quite possibly, be reminded of the bravery evidenced by thousands of youngsters in ravaged countries. "The Breadwinner" is, indeed a sobering story. It is also an uplifting tale of stamina and strength in the face of apparently insurmountable obstacles.

- Gail Cooke

The Breadwinner is a classic bestseller for our age. It ticks the didactic boxes perfectly - it is educational, not only that it is educational about a key humanitarian and religious travesty of the modern world: the fate of Muslim women under the tyrannical, barbaric, Islamo-fascist Taliban. The characters are clear cut: Parvana, the heroic girl who disguises herself as a boy to become the 'breadwinner' for her family; her father - the wise old educated Afghan teacher who is poised as a deliberate foil to all the Taliban have destroyed in Afghanistan; the Taliban themselves - hideous, Medieval, cruel, frightening barbarians (though we never discover why they have become like this).

Come on. From reading the reviews here you would think this was a children's masterpiece up there with Alice in Wonderland or the Hobbit. It is a nice, UN sanctioned type of book, with 2D characters, that could well be deployed to some important groundwork in the classroom by awakening children's awareness to what is going on in Afghanistan. But as a great piece of literature that educates their (and our) minds, hearts and language sensibilities, it falls sadly flat.

The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis is the story of an eleven-year-old girl, Parvana, who lives in Afghanistan under the oppressive rule of the Taliban. After her father's imprisonment (for having a foreign education), she must disguise herself as a boy in order to safely leave the bombed out apartment she shares with her mother and siblings and be her family's "breadwinner".
While the plot is based on stories from the author's interviews with Afghan women in refugee camps, the reader senses that the story is little more than a stringing together of incidents. The characters are so underdeveloped that, even though one is surely sympathetic to their horrible situation, it is difficult to feel an emotional attatchment to any of them, even Parvana. If there is value in reading this book it is that the horrors of Taliban rule, as recounted in the lives of Parvana and her family, serve to remind us that we must never allow any group that seeks to limit the freedom of others to gain power.

While Parvana is an engaging character at times, this book and it's sequel lack the rich description which is needed to help children from more developed countries understand the geography, cultural practices, social stratification, and other intiricacies in Afghanistan under the Taliban and beyond. In the book, the Taliban arose out of no where -- and the impression is given to the reader that this is so -- whereas their development is much more difficult to explain in truth.

Most disturbing is the scene where Parvana and some other children are digging up bones in a graveyard & selling them. There is absolutely no hint as to what becomes of the bones once they are sold. It is also a surprising scene because anyone who knows Afghan (& Muslim) culture knows how closely the dead (& graveyards) are revered in the region. Whenever one walks/drives past a graveyard, there is a prayer which is said to bless the self and the dead -- excusing yourself from distrubing the dead. So how is it possible that they were really digging up and selling human bones under the Taliban? Given that the Talibs were Muslim fundamentalists, it is highly unlikely they would have tolerated the disturbance of the dead in this fashion. There are often rumours surrounding the myths of poor and working children's lives in the developing world & I wonder whether the picking and selling of human bones isn't one of them?

While it is important to engage youth from developed countries in the issues of war and conflict, I am not convinced that this book does so in a meaningful way. It would be useful, for example, if there were a third book which presented the lives of pro-Taliban children/youth in the rural areas from where this movement arose. Finally, the lives of Afghan children who never knew the pre-war privileges afforded to Parvana's educated family are not shown substantially in the book and yet they represent the vast majority of Afghan children.

My eight year-old and I read it together so we could pause and talk about the story. We wanted to stop and talk about nearly every character and every plot turn. Although some scenes are graphic, they are not gory. This is a conversation starter suitable for a youth book club or enjoying with a friend. We hope Ms Ellis has a sequel planned.

The Breadwinner is a historical fiction book about the hard life in Afghanistan. A young girl has to dress as a boy to earn money for food. The woman can`t go outside without a man. Afghanistan at the time was ruled by a cruel Taliban group. The main characteris forced to dress as a boy because her father is in prison for being an educated man.One of the ways she got money is from digging up peoples bones from bomb rubble. This book is great because we learn about the hard life in other countries. This book is for grades five through seven.

The BreadWinner is a fantastic book.It is full of adventure.It's about a little girl, named Parvana, who lives in Afghanistan during a time when girls weren't allowed to go outside without a man to work and get money. But one day her father went away to prison wich meant they had no other boy to go out and get the food and milk they needed. Soon they needed food so badly they shaved Parvana's hair off so she could look like a boy and could get the food.This was a new experience for Parvana. Every day she would go out and earn money by selling things or reading and writting letters for the people. Then she would buy the food for the family. If you want find out more about this book I think you should read it.

I highly reccomend this book. I think the content is important and people need to know what happened in Afganistan. However, I am 14 years old and found some parts of the book very disturbing and maybe a parent needs to read the book first and decide if a younger child under 12 is mature enough to read about such a harsh reality.