Ostensibly, this is not a book about books; not even remotely. It is a detailed account of a teenage girl coming of age in Pakistan in an era of increasing Taliban dominance, and her efforts to fight for the education of women and girls in her country. There is no suspense or drama, because anyone who even remotely keeps up with current events knows how it ends -- Malala is targeted and shot on her way to school, along with several of her classmates. She survived the attack, but as a result her and her family are now living in Europe in exile, and will not likely return to Pakistan unless the Taliban presence is utterly eradicated there.
I don't normally read memoirs like this; the book has a bit of that sensationalist celebrity ghost-written vibe to it, and it is really unclear how much of Malala's beliefs and words are her own. However, what I found very touching and relatable about her account was the way books and reading marked the passage of time for her, in the context of what was essentially a civil war in her valley. I think younger people have a harder time processing the passage of time,. and so the events of her account read very didactically and repetitively; she seems unable to parse out the larger, over-arching themes and movements of her own story, and the book really drags when she gets caught up trying to describe a sequence of detailed events. However, she always manages to pull the narrative back into her own personal experience when she details her educational experiences that occurred alongside these much larger events, particularly books she was reading at the time. Her choices seems suspect -- she claims to have read Anna Karenina when she was ten, for example, but I loved the way readership was woven into the conflict. As an avid reader, so many of my strong memories are tied to the books I was reading at the time. The high value she places on her own education is clearly so genuine, and these moments in the narrative were, to me, the most impactful. I very much hope that she continues to write as she matures, because although this is, after all, a book that was written by a fourteen-year old (and it shows), she has so much potential as a thinker and a very public figure.