Dawn and Dusk

KLIATT - Claire Rosser

With much of the news focus on the Middle East, many of us know something about the Kurds, the minority people in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran who are eager for autonomy. Mead tells the story of one Kurdish family living in Iran during the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s. The narrator is a young adolescent boy named Azad, a schoolboy living with his father, with a pet parrot and friends and a life that could be considered normal. It's true his parents are divorced, but he is able to visit his mother and her family fairly often. A crucial element of the plot is Azad's learning why his parents divorced. He is shocked to hear that his father, after being tortured, agreed to become a spy for the police, even against his own people. Children stay with the father during divorce, and Azad's mother and her family are far more dedicated to freedom and live under constant risk of being arrested, so Azad is safer with his father. The event that changes all their lives dramatically is the gassing of their town by Saddam Hussein's air force. Hundreds of people die and many more are ill. Azad and his best friend are gassed when the bombs fall, but they manage to cover their faces and get away from the worst of it. Azad seeks refuge in a mountain village with his mother's family, but their only hope of survival is to become refugees and leave Iran. Mead has written about other children in peril, including the book Girl of Kosovo. This story makes current events real to adolescent readers.

Children's Literature - Greg M. Romaneck

The Kurdish people possess a long and storied past. Over the centuries, Kurds have assumed positions of leadership in such illustrious regimes as Alexander the Great's Empire, the Imperial Court of the Persian monarchs, and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. It has also been the lot of the Kurds, however, to see their native homeland consistently divided among other nations. Over the years, Kurdish attempts to reestablish their homeland, or even maintain their ethnic identify, have frequently led to catastrophic oppression by other nations. In this novel, the story of a Kurdish boy and his family during the Iran-Iraq war is told with an eye for both detail and authentic emotion. In this tale, young Azad lives a life divided by his parents' divorce. Plagued by fear that Iraqi bombers will drop poison gas on his hometown, Azad sees that terrible fear come to fruition. Additionally, Azad's older brother must flee the secret police of the Iranian government as he becomes involved in Kurdish underground activities. Eventually, Azad and his family are forced to make the difficult decision of whether their ancestral homeland is a safe place for them to continue to reside. Told with great emotion, Dawn to Dusk is a touching tale and one that tells the story of a group of people whose fate has often been ignored in the West.

VOYA - Snow Wildsmith

Azad's life is complicated. His parents divorced seven years ago, and Iranian law requires him to live with his distant, drunken father. The government takes people away for little reason, and they are never seen again. The residents of his town in the Zagros Mountains know that the Kurds are marginalized by most of the world, but they try to pursue a happy life anyway. Now, however, they are told to prepare for chemical weapon attacks by neighboring Iraq. Why would Iraq bomb them, and how are Azad and his family going to manage to survive? The story Mead tries to tell, of Saddam Hussein beginning to implement his planned genocide of the Kurds in 1987, is important, but her writing is not up to the task. Azad's story is told in a stilted, awkward fashion, as if it had been badly translated or as if the author was attempting a simplistic style that might mimic the voice of a child. This awkwardness severely limits the impact of the bombing, instead of bringing the horror into sharp focus as it should. In addition, several important terms go unexplained, while other details are overly explicated. The book fills a gap, however, and because there are not any major content issues, this title can be read by the youngest of middle school students. It is an optional purchase for late elementary and early middle school collections that might appeal to readers who have read all of the library's Holocaust fiction.