The Girl with a Brave Heart by Rita Jahanforuz is a hardback book from Barefoot Books that is set in Tehran. Illustrated throughout, this is a lovely quality book with a fairly lengthy story aimed at children aged 4-10 years. My daughter is 5 and I felt this as a lovely length to read to her but not too long that she got bored.
If I’m really honest I’m not sure I would have given the book a second look from the front cover but I sat down with Miss M to read it one evening and I have to say I was very surprised by the story inside and how much we both enjoyed it. It’s about a young girl Shiraz who lives with her stepmum and stepsister and is made to do all the housework. Then one day she drops a ball of wool over the terrace into the neighbour’s garden. After knocking on the door, an old lady asks her to do a number of jobs before returning the wool. Shiraz sees through the old lady’s requests and does the job she feels is right rather than exactly what she asks. As a reward for this she gets to jump in a pool that makes her look as beautiful on the outside as she feels on the inside.
Her stepsister tries for the same results without success and the moral of the story is ‘When people are sad, they do not always know how to ask for what they need’
I found this story totally enchanting and both 5yr old Miss M and myself really enjoyed it. We have read it several times and found the storyline to be fast moving which really helped maintain interest and eagerness to find out what happened next. With it’s traditional feel and values to be learnt, I think this is a great book for young girls to read.
We loved the storyline of The Girl with a Brave Heart and it’s a book that we’ll read again and again.
All reviews are my own and my family’s opinions. We are not paid for reviews although we do receive the product to try out and enable us to write the review.
This sounds lovely! I will have to have a look at some of the 5+ books from barefoot, I tend to stick with the younger ones but my oldest will be 5 next month so might be good to move him on!
We were given this at the BritMums meetup I went to recently which Barefoot Books hosted. It’s a lovely book, my Monkey is a bit young for it, so have passed to my god-daughter. Her Dad spent his early childhood in Iran so seemed rather apt.