
Member Reviews

I loved Safiyyah's War but this book blew me away. I was drawn into the lives of the characters from the very first page but I also had no idea about this period of history and found the facts and information which were woven into the text both heartbreaking and staggering. Hiba Noor Khan makes the history personal and relatable by exploring how it impacted on different generations of an Indian family, showing us through the characters' eyes. It's beautifully written, emotionally charged and completely eye-opening, plus their is edge of your seat tension made all the more powerful by knowing it is inspired by true events. I would recommend this to any educator, parent and reader.

The Line They Drew Through Us offers a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful story of the lives of three children caught up in India's partition. Hiba Noor Khan spends the first half of the novel showing us a cohesive and close-knit community in a village near Lahore where those of different religions live harmoniously together, before showing how they are all effected by the violence stoked up by the British 'divide and rule' policy as independence and partition loom closer.
Khan doesn't sanitise the horrors of this mob violence, and at times this is almost unbearably sad to read, but the courage and compassion shown by both children and adults in this novel offers us hope. This is a powerful and important children's novel which will be popular with confident readers in upper kS2 as well as KS3. Many thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.