You know why? Because Ellis donates proceeds from her books to help the people she writes about-and in the case of The Breadwinner series, this means she's donated over a million dollars to organizations dedicated to helping women and children in Afghanistan. In other words, Ellis hasn't just written a bunch of books about life in Afghanistan-she's done a very authentic job.Īnd while we're all for borrowing books from your local library (libraries are awesome), this is one book you just might want to purchase. It is the first in a series of four books about Parvana's life-followed by Parvana's Journey, Mud City, and My Name is Parvana-and the series as a whole won both the Peter Pan Prize and the Middle East Book Award. But more generally, it's a book about the horrific living conditions of the Afghan people under Taliban rule, with a particular concern for the intensely cruel treatment of women.Įllis interviewed children and refuges from Afghanistan to make this book as true to life as possible. The Breadwinner(2001) is about eleven-year-old Parvana, a girl who pretends she is a boy in order to earn money for her family while her father is in prison. In 1996, she visited Afghanistan to visit with women after hearing about their mistreatment under the Taliban, and during her visit, she heard of a girl who pretended to a boy in order to support her family.Įllis decided to turn this story into a book. And we've got a hunch that Taliban probably wouldn't like Deborah Ellis either.ĭeborah Ellis is from Canada, and is a counselor and writer but most notably, she is an activist for women and for peace. Malala was a teenager living in Pakistan under Taliban rule, when she was shot in the head by a Taliban soldier one day on her way home from school-all because they didn't like that she was an advocate for women's education.

My name is parvana