Yet not everyone supports the school’s goals. A number of families, lacking in education themselves, want their daughters to learn to read, write and do math. Parvana’s older sister Nooria is one of the teachers, while Parvana and younger sister Maryam are students, and Asif acts as a sort of technician/handyman. With the support of charitable agencies, Parvana’s mother and some other women banded together to form a school for girls. My Name is Parvana reveals what has happened in the interim. She does math in her head and thinks about the past, and this is how we learn both the events leading to Parvana’s detention and the reason for her silence.Īt the end of Parvana’s Journey, Parvana and her traveling companions (the children Laila, Hassan and Asif) made it to a refugee camp, and Parvana, miraculously, found her mother and surviving siblings, although a tragedy is the cause for their reunion. Parvana retreats into her own thoughts, using coping techniques that she honed over her time as a traveling refugee searching for her family.

The assumption of the interrogator is that Parvana is a terrorist who had something to do with the bombing of a school. While she lives in a clean cell, with enough food and water, she is subjected to some extreme methods of interrogation, including sleep deprivation and a constant barrage of loud music.

As the male officer and female interpreter try to speak with Parvana, she maintains silence, refusing to acknowledge that she can understand when they use English, Dari and Pashtu to interrogate her. Parvana’s story is told mostly through flashbacks as she sits isolated in a US army base prison somewhere in Afghanistan. Through her YA novels, Ellis shows the perspective of a girl, now a young woman, as she tries not just to survive but to develop her own independence and power in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. US troops and bases are nearby, and the Taliban is still terrorizing the people, especially women and girls. Several years have passed, Parvana is now a teenager, and Afghanistan is still rocked by war. In this final novel of Deborah Ellis’ The Breadwinner series, we are reunited with Parvana, the young girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to support her family and survive in war torn, Taliban controlled Afghanistan.

My Name Is Parvana by Deborah Ellis