Najmah is a young Afghan girl who helps her family herd goats. When her father and brother are conscripted by the Taliban, Najmah and her mother try to keep Najmah’s uncle from claiming their land. But life is achingly hard, and Najmah’s mother and newborn brother die. Najmah ends up a refugee, posing as a small boy for safety as she makes a dangerous journey with a group of families to the city of Peshawar. There she finds respite at a small school for refugee children. Nusrat is an American woman who converted to Islam after she met Faiz, an Afghan doctor in New York. They fell and love and married, but her conversion had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her own search for meaning: she feels at home with Islam. They came to Afghanistan together after Faiz felt the need to help people suffering under the Taliban’s brutal rule. In Peshawar, Nusrat focuses her energy and attention on the small school she runs for refugee children, saving her worry about Faiz, whom she hasn’t heard from, and whose work has taken him into the most dangerous parts of the country, for the times she is alone. In a story that moves back and forth between Najmah’s quiet, compelling first-person voice, and a third-person narrative chronicling Nusrat’s experiences, Suzanne Fisher Staples gradually weaves these two lives together in her illuminating novel set in Afghanistan at the start of the twenty-first century. It is a story that chronicles the horror of oppression and, ultimately, the strength of the human spirit. While Najmah’s story is accessible to children, the adult concerns of Nusrat’s life are more likely to engage older readeres. (Ages 12–18)

Intertwined portraits of courage and hope in Afghanistan and Pakistan 

Najmah, a young Afghan girl whose name means “star,” suddenly finds herself alone when her father and older brother are conscripted by the Taliban and her mother and newborn brother are killed in an air raid. An American woman, Elaine, whose Islamic name is Nusrat, is also on her own. She waits out the war in Peshawar, Pakistan, teaching refugee children under the persimmon tree in her garden while her Afghan doctor husband runs a clinic in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.

Najmah’s father had always assured her that the stars would take care of her, just as Nusrat’s husband had promised that they would tell Nusrat where he was and that he was safe. As the two look to the skies for answers, their fates entwine. Najmah, seeking refuge and hoping to find her father and brother, begins the perilous journey through the mountains to cross the border into Pakistan. And Nusrat’s persimmon-tree school awaits Najmah’s arrival. Together, they both seek their way home.

Known for her award-winning fiction set in South Asia, Suzanne Fisher Staples revisits that part of the world in this beautifully written, heartrending novel.

 

Under the Persimmon Tree is a 2006 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.