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When Wings Expand

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

She wrapped her arms around me and said, "Nur! I know. I don't want to go. But all I can do is keep trusting in Allah. Nur, I will always be with you! My love and advice will always be with you to guide you in the right direction." She patted my heart. "They are forever sealed inside this little place."

Writing on the pages of her journal, Nur, a teenage girl in Canada, charts the onset and advance of her mother's cancer. Nur watches her mother's body begin to shrink and her mood begin to darken. And when family and friends begin to encroach, Nur must face the prospect of her mother's looming death.

Nur bears the crushing loss and finds her adolescent life more demanding and complex. But with the legacy of her mother's love, her family's support, and the guidance of her faith, she manages to overcome the searing pain and use her newfound strength to bring joy to the lives of others, showing them that after death wings can expand.

Mehded Maryam Sinclair is a professional storyteller with twenty-five years of experience. Her career as a touring and teaching artist began with Vermont Council. She lived in Turkey for ten years, teaching language and storytelling, and now resides in Amman, Jordan. Mehded is the author of two picture books, Miraculous Happenings in the Year of the Elephant and A Trust of Treasures (both published by Kube Publishing, Ltd).

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Winner of the Unpublished Muslim Writer's Award 2011.

She wrapped her arms around me and said, "Nur! I know. I don't want to go. But all I can do is keep trusting in Allah. Nur, I will always be with you! My love and advice will always be with you to guide you in the right direction." She patted my heart. "They are forever sealed inside this little place."

Writing on the pages of her journal, Nur, a teenage girl in Canada, charts the onset and advance of her mother's cancer. Nur watches her mother's body begin to shrink and her mood begin to darken. And when family and friends begin to encroach, Nur must face the prospect of her mother's looming death.

Nur bears the crushing loss and finds her adolescent life more demanding and complex. But with the legacy of her mother's love, her family's support, and the guidance of her faith, she manages to overcome the searing pain and use her newfound strength to bring joy to the lives of others, showing them that after death wings can expand.

Mehded Maryam Sinclair is a professional storyteller with twenty-five years of experience. Her career as a touring and teaching artist began with Vermont Council. She lived in Turkey for ten years, teaching language and storytelling, and now resides in Amman, Jordan. Mehded is the author of two picture books, Miraculous Happenings in the Year of the Elephant and A Trust of Treasures (both published by Kube Publishing, Ltd).

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    • Kirkus

      January 15, 2013
      A 12-year-old Canadian Muslim girl chronicles the death of her terminally ill mother and her slow healing. When the book opens, Nur's mother has been sick for months, and treatments seem to be going nowhere. Nur picks up the diary her mother gave her and names it "Buraq" after a legendary animal that flew Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem. The piety that guides her here carries her through the gut-wrenching grief that is to follow, as does the discovery of some monarch butterfly chrysalises. Nur's Baba tells her that "Allah has made everything in a pattern. He said people are part of that pattern too. Just like chrysalises don't stay the same, people don't stay the same either." While skeptics may find the metaphor of a butterfly's emergence from a chrysalis an inapt way to help a child deal with the death of a parent, it seems to work for Nur. Whether this book will work for children is another open question. Nur is so good, so pious, so ingenuous that she is very hard to relate to. While her grief and her rage never feel false, they are so quickly mitigated by her faith, at first mediated by her devout parents (her mother dies with "Allah" on her lips) and later on her own, that she seems more a role model for grieving in Islam than a real child. There are so few children's books featuring sympathetic Muslim characters that it's impossible to discount this one, but it's pretty pallid stuff. (glossary) (Fiction. 8-12)

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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