Rainy Day Reads

I have been meaning to get my hands on this book for a while, and having set myself a goal of reading 12 non-fiction books this year AND placing this specific book on my 2017 Bingo Board I figured it was time to buckle down and do it! I think we all know who Malala is. As the title says she was the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taleban. I had never heard of her before she was shot and it was all over the news. I thought she was more or less randomly targeted by the Taleban and only took up her fight for education for girls after the fact. But it turns out that she did a great deal of campaigning and activism before she was shot, and this was the reason she was targeted.  In this book we learn about her life mostly before the shots and we see how her home in Pakistan slowly but securely came under the thumb of the Taleban. Meanwhile Malala and her father, himself an avid activist for education, fight to keep Pakistan from turning into the Taleban...

This book spans a number of years and the story is narrated by a number of people. Essentially we follow one family. This family lives in Afghanistan and as the story begins in 1952 it is about to be split apart. We follow the different members of the family, how they are scattered across the world and how they slowly find their way back again, either to their homeland or to each other. I can’t really say too much more without spoiling things, so I won’t.   This is definitely a slow burning book about family and the ties we create and break with other people. And that sort of story is usually not for me, which is probably why I didn't enjoy this book too much. It was well written, but the jumping in time and perspective would usually throw me for loop every time, and I just find that annoying. Each narrator would usually have a good chunk of text, so whenever it changed it would take a little time to adjust and figure out who was telling the story now.  As I ...