A Review Of The Breadwinner By Deborah Ellis

In this historical fiction novel “The Breadwinner,” an audacious eleven-year old Afghan girl has no choice but to work as a letter reader and masquerade as a boy in order for her family to survive. There are many characters- Parvana, Parvana's younger sister Maryam, their younger brother Ali, their older sister Nooria, and their parents. Mrs. Weera and her granddaughter also make an appearance in the story. Parvana’s family lives in a one room apartment, previously bombed by the Taliban. After her father had been arrested for foreign education, there was no one who could get food or make money for the family. This causes a conflict in their survival, and Parvana and her family must attain another method of survival.

I enjoyed the conflict that Deborah Ellis created in her award-winning story. It really teaches me a great overall lesson over how I can improve my acts of kindness. It reveals how many other people are living around the world, and what others are doing to conflict it. I think that learning how Parvana’s family is going through hardships to survive can benefit me because I am not doing anything to attempt to prevent this. Even though we may not influence everyone to make a halt to wars, we can make a change by helping those who have been through hardships because of the wars.

I also liked that Deborah Ellis used positive, comparative, and superlative adjectives to make her tale whimsical. For example, Parvana was describing her home, and the setting she had grown up in for many years. She spoke, as if nothing were wrong about her home. As if everyone had grown up in bombed houses. As if all the women never went outside. She spoke so smoothly, and it made it seem so realistic. It was as if you could picture the entire hometown of Kabul in your mind, without even having to experience it yourself. Deborah Ellis’ magical adjectives made a great impact on the outline of the story.

I especially loved the dedication that Deborah Ellis put into her story. She made sure everyone would understand the moral of the story she put out for everyone. I think that the intuition for the readers can improve and we can learn so many new things. We can learn the disadvantages and advantages of lying. In their scenario, you can be sentenced to death if you were caught lying from the Taliban. You can learn what many other people must do for their families to survive. Sometimes, I compare and contrast my life and the lives of children in Kabul. They live in a one room house with a cupboard and a toshak, while I have a whole house with many luxuries. They don’t know whether they will have food for the next day, and all we do is pick out the foods we don’t enjoy eating. We have the luxuries to go wherever we wanted, while women are stuck in their house, hoping that their husband will come home at the end of the day. What Deborah Ellis aimed to teach deeply taught me about the many great things we have, and what they might not have.

To sum it up, I was really delighted that I was able to read this book. I really admire the affectionate bonds that Parvana’s family shows throughout the whole story. They make the worst situations seem like it isn’t that bad, and find the sunshine in the storm. I recommend this story to children ages nine through twelve. I would like to rate this story 5/5.