Tasting the Sky

"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

 

 

"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