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Saturday 21 February 2015

A BOOK: WITH A ONE WORD TITLE

Hello! My school has put up a list of different genres of books and set a challenge to read 24 books in a year. While I won't even be at my school when this challenge ends and it's not an impossible amount of books I thought it would be a nice thing to do to get out of my reading-comfort-zone. And of course to tell you guys about.


So, a book with a one word title happened to be a book that I bought on my Kindle just before I went back to school so I thought it would be a good one to start off with. Typhoon by Qaisra Shahraz is the story of three women living within a Pakistani village and the problems and trauma that they all face. One is caught in the arms of another woman's husband, one is the husbands wife and the other was raped in her youth. The story is set over just a week, with a reunion of characters some 20 years later, allowing you to see how their attitudes have changed and how the events described earlier have had an impact on them. The end of this book was a great shock to me as it finishes with a huge tragedy that I didn't anticipate until it happened. The women are all powerful, even in a time of such male dominance, especially in their religion and country. Although not exactly admirable throughout, the women all hold great burdens and while reading you are always made to feel sympathetic towards them.

Culturally, this book is really interesting because of the staggering contrast between how this small village deals with such problems and how they would be dealt with here. The book also incorporates the villages language into sentences, although you're always able to understand the meanings. If you've read The Kite Runner then it's not dissimilar to how Indian words are scattered throughout.


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