In The Sea There Are Crocodiles: Based On The True Story Of Enaiatollah Akbari by Fabio Geda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This impressive account is simply, but compellingly told. I enjoyed reading it, although it does detail many difficult and horrible events.
On greater reflection, I was thinking about the difference of what happens to young boys in danger of the Taliban to what happens to young girls. A girl could not have made it all the way to Italy. It would be more likely for a young girl to have been subject to some sort of gender-based compulsory service, either through marriage at a young age or sold into sexual slavery, similarly to the tale told in Patricia McCormick's Sold. There is hope in this story, the one about Enaiatollah, but we have to remember that it was told by the boy who made it - not by the several who died along the way or who suffered other dismal fates. There is less hope in Sold, but even there, some of the young women escape. Somehow the sexual slavery is worse to me, but I am a woman, so perhaps that is why I react so strongly to that.
Either way, both books make a contribution to knowledge about a part of the world that Americans now know more about than in previous decades, due to our military efforts there, but which we still don't understand.
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