Early one morning Wei Gu meets an old man from the spirit world who tells the young bachelor about his future bride and their life together.
Primary (ages 6-9)
Material appropriate for primary age groups
The Butterfly Boy
A boy in long-ago China sees the world around him from a butterfly’s point of view.
Over the Deep Blue Sea
Prejudice linked to an event from the past threatens the friendship that Akiko and her brother have made with a boy on their new island home.
Caravan
A ten-year-old boy accompanies his father for the first time on a caravan trip through the mountains of Afghanistan to the city below where they will trade their goods at market.
The Earth Shook
Little Parisa-Farsi, left alone after an earthquake demolishes her home of Bam, Iran. She doesn’t despair. She does what any little girl would do. She dances. She laughs. She shares. She reveals our common humanity.
Sitti’s Secrets
A young girl describes a visit to see her grandmother in a Palestinian village on the West Bank.
Azad’s Camel
In a big Arabian city, an orphan boy is forced to work as a camel jockey — a dangerous job he doesn’t like. But a new friendship and a magical escape into the desert are about to change his life.
Camel racing is a popular sport in the Gulf states of the Middle East, where child jockeys from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Mauritania, and Eritrea are used to ride the camels. Some impoverished families are persuaded to sell sons as young as five years old, who are taken away to be trained and often badly treated. Accidents are common, and when a little jockey falls off a racing camel, he can receive serious injuries. Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates have all banned the use of child jockeys and are returning children to their families so that they can go to school and live a normal life.
The Sandwich Swap
Lily and Salma are best friends. They play together and stick together through thick and thin. But who would have ever thought that ordinary peanut butter or plain old hummus could come between them? Lily and Salma don’t quite understand each other’s tastes, but does that mean they can’t be friends? They understand far better than a lot of gown ups that these things hardly matter and that friendship is the most important thing of all.Her Majesty,Queen Rania’s children’s book is inspired by her own experience.
Join the discussion of The Sandwich Shop as well as other books centered around relocation on our My Take/Your Take page.
Beautiful Yetta
Yetta, beautiful Yetta, manages to escape from the butcher’s shop. But now she is lost in Brooklyn–a strange place filled with rude rats and dangerous buses! But then, brave Yetta saves a small green bird from a sneaky cat, and his friends, the wild parrots of Brooklyn, are very grateful.
Forty Fortune
A well-intentioned fortune-telling peasant unwittingly tricks a band of local thieves into returning the king’s stolen treasure.