Khan hints at the boy's powerful emotions in spare prose, and handles her difficult subject matter sensitively. When Maha is injured by a truck, the boy must set aside his weaving to come to his family's aid. For him, weaving is a skill that ensures ""my family will never go hungry"" and an outlet that allows him to create a world of color and beauty (""Everything in camp is a dirty brown, so I do not use brown anywhere in my carpets""). At dawn, a muezzin calls him to prayer he then attends school, followed by another call to prayer and finally goes off to his long-awaited practice of carpet weaving. In a recurring nightmare, the boy narrator flees with his mother and younger sister, Maha, from the bomber planes that killed his father, then awakes to find himself in a safe but impoverished camp. This realistic story follows a day in the life of a young Afghani refugee who takes solace in the beautiful carpets he weaves.
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