By Reem Faruqi
Lailah has moved from Abu Dhabi to a school in Georgia where nobody knows what Ramadan is, and she's finally old enough to fast — if she can work out how to say so.
Lailah is ten, and she's just moved to Peachtree City, Georgia, from Abu Dhabi, and she misses her friends. This is the first year she's old enough to fast for Ramadan, which she's been waiting for. The trouble is her new school. When lunch comes she doesn't want to walk into the cafeteria and sit in front of food she isn't eating while everyone asks why, so she keeps it to herself. She hides. She writes a note to explain it to her teacher and can't hand it over — she stands outside the classroom door with the note in her hand and walks away again. Most of the book is a girl carrying one small, heavy secret around a building, and the secret is just that she's proud of something and can't find the words for it. The librarian is the one who helps her find them.
Most Ramadan books explain the holiday to someone standing outside it. This one is about what it costs to be the only child in the building who's fasting. Reem Faruqi lived it — she made the same move from Abu Dhabi to the same Georgia town — so the texture is exact in a way invented books rarely manage: the awkwardness of the cafeteria, the note she can't hand over, the wanting to explain and the not wanting to be stared at. For a Muslim child, this may be the first book where the person on the page is just having their week. For a child who isn't, it puts them at the table next to Lailah instead of across from her. Lea Lyon paints in warm watercolor and lets Lailah's face carry most of it.