"A spare elegant memoir . . . What makes [it] so compelling is the immediacy of the child's viewpoint, which depicts both conflict and daily life without exploitation or sentimentality. There's much to talk about here." --Starred, Booklist
"Beautifully crafted. Readers will be charmed by the writer-to-be as she falls in love with chalk, the Arabic alphabet, and the first-grade teacher who recognizes her abilities."--Starred, School Library Journal
"A compassionate, insightful family and cultural portrait." --Starred, Kirkus Reviews
“Brims with tension and emotion.” --Publishers Weekly
"Barakat strives to depict vivid details of everyday life . . . Well worth purchasing to provide a viewpoint not often available to young adults in the United States."--VOYA
“This is an astonishingly beautiful and heartbreaking book. The resurrected memories of a gifted girl growing up under the crush of war and occupation gave me hope: that if we read carefully, with open hearts, the world just might begin to change.”
—Suzanne Fisher Staples, author of Under the Persimmon Tree
“Ibtisam Barakat is not only a luminous writer and thinker, she is a wondrous healer, too. In this exquisite, tender account of her Palestinian childhood, nothing is missing—love, attachment, struggle, fear, humor, resilience. The child in this story carries more wisdom and a keener sense of justice and injustice than do most people in seats of power. Tasting the Sky should be read by everyone with a humane interest in the story of Palestine.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Habibi
“This is a poignant, eloquent testament of a war-torn childhood, a story we in the United States have only glimpsed before now. This generous author has truly opened her heart for all to see.”
—Jennifer Armstrong, author of The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History
“In vivid, beautiful prose, Ibtisam Barakat transports readers into a place few Westerners have ever seen—the interior life of a young girl and her family in the occupied West Bank. This book, appropriate for readers young and old, holds literature’s great power: the power to humanize the ‘other,’ and to therefore change the way we understand our world.”
—Sandy Tolan, author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
"An extremely compelling memoir about a young Palestinian girl who lived through the Six Day War in the Middle East . . . interesting [and] heartwarming."
—A YALSA YA Galley Teen Reader
"This book is very eye opening -- it tells the side of the story that you never learn about in history class and in the news, and it is really well written."
—A YALSA YA Galley Teen Reader
