Kiss the Dust

by Elizabeth Laird

Overview

Her father's involvement with the Kurdish resistance movement in Iraq forces 13-year-old Tara to flee with her family over the border into Iran, where they face an unknown future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780780741263
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/28/1994
Pages:	278
Product dimensions:	4.40(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	10 - 13 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Laird is a writer of children's fiction and travel, and lives in England. She is also known for the large body of folktales which she collected from the regions of Ethiopia. Her books have been translated into at least fifteen languages Her works include: Red Sky in the Morning—Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Children's Book Award; Hiding Out – Winner of the Smarties Young Judges Award; Jake's Tower – Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Book Award; The Garbage King – Winner of the Scottish Arts Council Children's Book of the Year award and the Stockport Book award. It has also been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the Blue Peter Award, the Salford Children's Book Award, the Calderdale Children's Book Award, the Lincolnshire Young People's Book Award, the Stockton Children's Book of the Year, the West Sussex Children's Book Award, the Portsmouth Book Award and the Sheffield Children's Book Award; and A Little Piece of Ground – Winner of the Hampshire Book Award and has been shortlisted for the Southern Schools Book Award.

Editorial Reviews

Laird weaves compelling facts about the conflicts between the Arabs and the Kurds into her gripping tale about one family's escape to freedom. After witnessing a teen's brutal murder and meeting a wounded revolutionary, 12-year-old Tara begins to realize the extent of persecution in her native Iraq. When her Kurdish father is sought by the secret police, Tara and her family abandon their home and head north to the mountains. Their refuge is short-lived, however; bombs begin to drop and they flee across the Iranian border to a primitive refugee camp. Stripped of their dignity and still not out of danger, the family plots to leave the continent, despite slim chances of asylum. The author personalizes the Kurdish experience by sensitively portraying Tara's feelings of loss, degradation and uprootedness. Although some readers may find the girl's initial naivete as hard to swallow as her abrupt awakening to violence, most will overlook these minor weaknesses as the story's tension rapidly mounts. Even those familiar with political problems in Iraq and Iran may be shocked by the graphic depiction of tyranny--and may sense that despite their hardships, Tara's family fares better than many people who risk their lives for independence. Ages 10-up. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The plight of the refugee is universal. In this story, we meet Tara, 13, who is like any other modern day teenager. Within a short time, she and her family, who are Kurds, are forced to flee Iraq during the 1984 Iran-Iraq War. Although the setting is exotic and timely, the characters are ordinary people who long for freedom, peace and a decent way of life; yet, they are herded into harsh refugee camps, gradually making their way to relatives in Iran and finally, to London. Superficially, this is an engrossing adventure story but at a deeper level, the story allows us to empathize with the people.

Children's Literature - Jan Lieberman

Gr 6-8-- A fictional account of a Kurdish family during the Iran-Iraq War in the mid-1980s, when many Iraqi Kurds who had been struggling to establish a homeland were forced to take refuge in Iran and other countries. Laird focuses on 13-year-old Tara, an urban girl who finds herself fleeing with her family from Iraqi secret police, then living in a wartorn village and surviving in an Iranian relocation camp before finally escaping to England. While Laird dispels many of the stereotypes young people may have of the Middle East by showing Tara as a thoroughly modern girl who loves to ride in her family's Mercedes or watch her VCR, there are times when observations about Kurdish heritage and struggle emphasize differences in clothes rather than examining ideology or religion. Often, cliched phrases are jarring distractions from the location and mood of the story. Still, the author clearly shows the changes wrought in a young girl who comes to an awareness of the struggles of her people and leaves behind the comfortable, spoiled existence she'd known. Because Tara remains connected to her family at all times, and rides in a car and shops during excursions from the relocation camp, Laird's account of Tara's plight may sound, at times, less desperate and frightening then other refugee novels that focus on separation and severe deprivation, such as Tamar Bergman's Along the Tracks (Houghton, 1991). But in some ways those contemporary elements may have even more impact for readers who will be forced to realize that atrocities are not relegated to the past and that freedom is not easily won.-- Susan Knorr, Milwaukee Public Library, WI

School Library Journal

"Weaves compelling facts about the conflict between the Arabs and the Kurds into a gripping tale about one family's escape to freedom." —Publishers Weekly starred review

"An important contribution to the growing number of refugee stories." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher