It is the holy month of Ramadan, and I want to wish all my Muslim friends a wonderful celebration.
On this special occasion, I want to share a beautiful middle-grade novel, Golden Girl, by award-winning author Reem Faruqi. She also wrote, Unsettled, which I reviewed last year.
Thirteen-year-old, Aafiyah Qamar, is a Pakistani-American girl who lives in Atlanta with her family. She is happy, surrounded by so many things she loves, including weird-but-true books, her parents, her little brother, Ibrahim, tennis, and her best friend in the whole world, Zaina. Her dad repaired airplanes for airlines, so the family travels to beautiful places in first class. Her life is cheery and fun, but issues in her life appear when her grandfather gets diagnosed with cancer, and they travel to Pakistan. Her dad is wrongfully accused of a crime and gets arrested in Dubai on the way. They return to the United States without her dad. Her entire life becomes a mess, and her family’s world falls apart. The family loses money because they need to find a lawyer and pay for her grandfather’s chemo treatment that he needs to start. Her mother has to work as a cleaner to support the family. Then Aafiyah gets a dangerous idea. She has a bad habit of picking things that don’t belong to her but returning them later. She cannot control herself. She decides to support her family by taking things that aren’t hers and later faces the consequences for the actions and possibly destroying a friendship. What will happen next? Will Aafiyah’s father be freed? How will the family be able to stay financially stable? Will grandpa recover? Will the family be happy again? Read this book to find out.
I read this book in ONE WHOLE DAY; I couldn’t put it down. Typically, it takes me 4-6 days to finish a book, but this book kept me hooked, and I couldn’t put it down. It was so interesting and so beautifully written. My favorite part about this book was how it was written in verse and sounded so much like simple poetry. The book cover is beautiful with a picture of a girl wearing shalwar kurta and jewelry.
It covers important themes of family, friendship, learning from mistakes, and forgiveness.
If you would like to read this book, you can get it from your local library, Amazon, or any audiobook website you use.
Take Care, Everyone!