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2005
finalists.

2005 Hackmatack

Children's Choice Book Award/Prix littéraire - le choix de jeunes

The final book of the trilogy including Hackmatack winner The Breadwinner and Governor General's Award nominee Parvana's Journey. Fourteen-year-old Shauzia, has escaped the misery of her life in Kabul, only to end up in a refugee camp in Pakistan. She still dreams of seeing the ocean and eventually making a new life in France. This is the dream that has sustained her through the terrible years in Kabul — the dream for which she has forsaken family and friends. But it is hard to imagine herself in a field of purple lavender in the Widows' Compound of the muddy, crowded refugee camp outside Peshawar. Even worse, the compound is run by Mrs. Weera, Shauzia's bossy phys ed teacher from Kabul, who insists that Shauzia be useful in the camp and make the best of a dismal situation.

Shauzia finally decides to leave the camp and try her luck on the streets. She is determined to earn money to buy her passage out of the country. Peshawar is dangerous and full of desperately poor and wandering children like herself, but she has Jasper, the dog who followed her down from a shepherds' camp in to mountains, and she knows how to masquerade as a boy and comb the streets for jobs. She figures she knows how to survive. And survive she does, for a time — doing odd jobs, picking through garbage, begging when she has to - but an incident with a dishonest man lands her in jail, where she spends the night, terrified and despairing, before well-meaning Americans she met when she was begging rescue her.

They take her and Jasper to their home in a residential part of Peshawar, and for a time she has a taste of a life where children have food to eat and warm beds and toys to play with, and she feels safe for the first time. But just when she thinks the family will ask her to stay with them, disaster ensues, and Shauzia finds herself driven back to the refugee camp, where she discovers the old choices are not so easy any more.

Deborah Ellis is a writer who also works as a mental health residential counselor in Toronto. Her first novel for young teens, Looking for X, published in Fall 1999, won the 2000 Governor General's Award for Children's Text, as well as being shortlisted for the 1999 Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award and the 2001 Silver Birch Reading Award.

In 1999, Deborah spent several months talking with women and girls in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and Russia. During her stay, she met the mother and sister of a girl in Kabul who cut off her hair, put on boy's clothes and sold things off a tray in the marketplace to support her family. The incident inspired Deborah to write the trilogy to which Mud City belongs.

Thematic Links

• Afghanistan
• Life under oppressive regimes, plight of women
• Refugees
• Street children, surviving life on the streets
• Helping others, personal responsibility
• Truth, honesty

Suggested Activities

• Make a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• Make a collage or scrapbook of refugee camps in pakistan and around the world.
• Make a storyboard of what you imagine will happen to Shauzia next.
• Make a chart comparing the lives of the very rich and the very poor.
• Brainstorm how we might make the world a better place. Write a song or poem about it.