Born under millions shadows - Phillip Guse

I read this book for my English class, as a book for the reading challenge, I got to know this book because a friend gave me this book as a present, but I never had the change to read it, so I used this opportunity.

Born Under A Million Shadows is written by the British journalist, Andrea Busfield as a declaration of love to the beautiful country Afghanistan. The author is doing this by writing about the contrast between the Afghanistan traditions and the Western traditions, from the point of view of the eleven years old, modest boy called Fawad. This book is a real life fiction book.

Fawad is in this book the main character and in my opinion also the best one. Fawad is a little boy grown in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Taliban made a lot of mess in the city in the once happy and peaceful city Afghanistan’s.  They killed Fawad's father and brother and they kidnaped her sister. Fawad and his mother lives with her aunt in a small house, however the Muslim Fawad is full of happiness and humour. Moreover, through the book he gets surprised by the the different costumes of the western people once his mother got a job in a house from western people as a maid.  He becomes a boy with lots of luck and he becomes to see much more about the world he thought he would be.

The three western people, owner of the house are in this book the minor characters, James, Georgie and May. Fawad is surprised for their strange costumes, traditions and religion.  James the journalist does not do much more than hang around and drinking half-naked his beer in the sun, the blond May swarms for women and Georgie wears jeans and smokes. Celebrating Christmas by giving presents to each other, celebrating new year by drinking alcohol. All these things are new for Fawad and against the Muslim, he thinks they are strange weird people, however they make him laugh each time more and they make him remember how beautiful his country is even in bad times.

The theme of this book is how beautiful Afghanistan is and how lovely the people are, even if the country is full of war, misunderstandings and hate. How love and beauty can even be more powerful than hate and war. In my opinion I think the author succeed to transmit this theme, because of the way how she wrote, full of humour and happiness, despite the horrible thing in the book. Moreover, the perspective of the small Fawad makes it easier to associate with.  Therefore, I enjoyed to read the book and I recommend this book to read. Specially for people that like humour novels and that are open minded persons.