The Night Diary

Sometimes it surprises me how little I know about the world. Like, that I really had no idea that Pakistan only became a country when India gained independence from Great Britain and the country was split in two?! I had never even heard of the conflict, in fact. Is that part of K-12 history curriculum? I am so ignorant. One of the reviews on the back of The Night Diary claims it is set in a time "little known to American children" which made me feel a little better, but then again, I'm definitely not a child. It's a good thing Veera wrote a Newbery-honor-winning novel about the "Partition" or I may have continued in ignorance forever.

The Night Diary is a lovely book. There's plenty of peril and injustice and frustrating family silence, but it does all seem to resolve nicely by the end. Nisha's family becomes stronger and closer, she becomes wiser and kinder, her father becomes softer. The conflict itself, of course (ha! as if I even knew this conflict existed 12 hours ago), does not resolve nicely, but it is a relief that the fictional book family comes out alive and happy-ish.

One Not Very Important Note: The book is written as a series of journal entries by Nisha addressed to her mother (who died while giving birth to her and her twin Amil). Toward the beginning of the book, I was being hypercritical of the believe-ability of her entries (there's no way a 12-year-old could or would have written that much in a single day's journal entry; she would not have written a journal entry that poetically; there's no way she remembered that conversation verbatim), but by the end I was so caught up in the story, I hardly noticed they were journal entries. I think that's a good thing.