Some Annoying Points

              In this book most of the choices that were made were basic and simple. The hardest choices that Parvana made were those concerning ethics. Some of these were like leaving Asif or Hassan behind to die. One of the silliest decisions she made was when she and Asif let their hopes and imaginations go wild and dig for an imaginary treasure. They did find something but, it was a  box full of ammunition. This was scene was just there to eat up twenty pages. Later in the book Parvana's imagination makes life better for the whole gang (for your information that is Parvana, Hassan, Asif, and Leila). This place where they find refuge is Green Valley it was not named for its abundance of plants but after a mythical place that Parvana dreamed up. This fueled her persistence to make the valley she stumbled into the best she could. At this point in the book things were actually going somewhere.

In the begging the book was filled with useless wandering that had no direction except action and reaction and also finding little boys in the middle of nowhere. The whole book was just a story of a little girl with a hard life traveling  through  Afghanistan and how she reacts to it. The plot never really formed until after the mid-point. To kick start this plot Ellis killed off the most innocent character, a grandmother who had been devastated after a unnamed incident and was just getting back on her feet, literally. Then the resolution to Parvana's problem of trying to find her mother was very unlikely, well that’s fiction for you. After poor Leila dies her mother is suddenly there complaining of the amount of child deaths that have result form the war. This book should be for young readers because of its simplicity and predictability but, is not because of the abundance of death (well it does not go into detail but one can imagine) in the end.