The Power of Childrens Novels

On thursday we had an interesting discussion on the two pieces of childrens literature that was assigned to us to read. The first piece was titled, The Day of Ahmed’s Secret, this piece seemed to be a heart felt childrens novel that showed the pride a young boy took in his day of work. It took you through different scenes of Egypt with it's illustrations. We debated as to weather or not the illustrator was presenting Cairo to look like "arab land", I do believe that some of the images may have been a little skewed from what Egypt today is actually like. However, I think that the author was just trying their best to present Egypt historically and currently. Egypt does have cars and newer cities, but at the same time it still has maintained some of it's historical aspects with camels and street markets which today can be filled with many different types of people. Most of them probably "arab land" like, but also more moderized arab people. So I do not believe that this novel was trying to send out a hidden message to children about sterotypes in Egypt.
The second piece of literature was titled Sami and the Time of Troubles. This childrens story talked about a young boy and his experiences during a time of war. This was almost hard for me to believe that it was a childrens book. The pictures displayed the depression that the boy and his family were going through. The hardships of living in a town that was being bombed and having to wake up with no house and no city because it has all be burned away. The one thing that I think the novel is trying to express to kids is that it is okay to have your own opinion. When the children were protesting in the street they were displaying their opinion of the war. If a child were to read this it may encourage them to speak out more abou their feelings towards global issues and encourage them to form an opinion of their own. I kind of almost think that this was ment to be written for adults. We found so many debatable topics in the novel among a college level class. I think that this would be a great novel to talk about in the book because it discusses a topic that can be debated between all ages.