This Week’s Must Read: Malak Desert Child by Paul OGarra.
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Young adult novels don’t always open readers’ minds, but Malak Desert Child is the exception to the rule and should be on every parent’s radar.
As every parent knows, in this age of internet streaming, social media, and computer games, it’s all too easy for a teenager to get distracted from any pursuit that will enrich and expand their minds.
We’d all much prefer our children to dive into a book rather than blast aliens online, but you only have to take a look at some of the most popular young adult titles to understand that many are just the literary equivalent of popcorn: filling but with no substance.
A good read shouldn’t only be for entertainment; it should come packaged with additional elements that make us think, and question. Books are a vital means of broadening horizons, and this is never more crucial than when dealing with younger readers, whose mental outlook is still in the process of being formed.
This is a matter that YA author Paul OGarra takes seriously, as you will see from his interview below. In writing his new novel, Malak Desert Child, he has made sure that it is not only a cracking adventure that teens will love but also a novel that will introduce them to important, contemporary real-world affairs.
YA author Paul OGarra.
The story revolves around the eponymous Malak, a five-year-old girl who is both innocent and, in other ways, wise far beyond her years. When the novel opens, she is living in a small Moroccan coastal town. Though she has parents, they are desperately poor and are forced to live in a cave. Faced with these hardships, their daughter is, effectively, surviving as a street urchin. Yet though she is filthy and scruffy, the remarkable purity and foresight she possesses are plain to see on her grimy features:
“Her teeth were white and perfect, and her smile entirely unexpected in a face whose total lack of expression must have been the child’s only weapon against the evil and negligence which was happening around her, and which she instinctively knew was so, so wrong.”