By Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai tells her own childhood: she wished for a magic pencil to fix the world, and then found out a real one works.
When Malala was small she watched a television show about a boy with a magic pencil, and she wanted one. She'd draw a lock on her brothers' door. She'd draw a proper dinner. She'd rub out the smell from the rubbish dump near her house. Then she looked harder at that dump and saw children her own age sorting through it for things to sell instead of going to school, and her wishes started to change. Then powerful men came to her valley carrying guns and said girls could not go to school anymore. And Malala, still a child, picked up an ordinary pencil and wrote about it, and spoke about it, and would not stop. She tells it herself, in her own voice, and Kerascoët wrap the whole thing in watercolor and gold, so her wishes trail across the pages in glinting swirls.
It's Malala's own voice at a size a young child can hold, which is a rare thing, because most of what's written about her is written for grown-ups and starts with the shooting. This one starts with a girl who wanted a magic pencil, and that's a wish every child in the room has had. By the time the dangerous men arrive, your child is already on her side and already understands what's being taken. It makes the point that the courage was in the writing and the speaking, done by an ordinary girl with an ordinary pencil, so it ends with something a child can actually copy.