Book Review: I Am Malala (Young Reader’s Edition) by Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai accepted her Nobel Prize for Peace at the age of sixteen and orated with the confidence of someone beyond her years. She knows how to manage the crowd, being soft spoken when she tells her stories, stern to the audience as though she was holding them accountable and in all her speech, she spoke with conviction. She fixes her shawl every now and then, but it is her right hand that adds to her speech, like a fair disciplinarian, forefinger pointing in the air to emphasise a point.

What I knew about Malala is just from the surface popularity of the book covers, that I come across every now and then in random bookshelves. Like most of the books that I picked up, I’ve found this in an online discount (about USD$2). The trouble about buying online, especially through eCommerce platforms like Shopee is that sometimes you don’t really know what you’re gonna get. So they threw me the young readers edition. fuckkkKKKKKKKK!!!!

I can’t complain much though, because in some way this makes the book easier to read and I managed to finish it within 24 hours in a work night. The book reminds me a lot like Zlata’s diary and Anne Frank’s diary, sure. These are courageous young women living under the ravages of war. We need more stories like Malala, and people like Malala. Yes, we need more books like these — so that readers Malala’s age (when the book was written) can aspire for real changes.

Malala’s story is an eyewitness account to how the Taliban evolved from a racket in the radio to its sprawling dominance in Pakistan. It is the small things that make it for a rich reading: the reactions of the mother and daughter when they were told off by the Taliban for not covering their head enough; the death threats for the stubbornness of running a school with female students, the relationships with the siblings. It is a snapshot of a joyful life rapidly decaying.

It is a study of the anomaly — of a family going against the grain in their own beliefs, of a young woman who wants more knowledge than what the regime allows her to have. My personal MVP of the book is Malala’s father who ran the school in the Swat Valley despite having no money and being constantly threatened for running the school.

The topic of education was important for me for a long time. It is ironic that I did not read the book when I was running my non-profit. The Malala Fund has done important work to help underprivileged children to access education. She has tremendous success since then, and hopefully this success continues.