 Hi everyone, my name is Steph, this is Little Bookish Teacher and today I'm here to talk about a wonderful Lebanese-Australian Muslim middle grade series written by H Hayek. Now I received a review copy of the second book in this series which is Huda was Here and the first one, Huda and Me, was released I think in 2021 and it was shortlisted last year for the Children's Book Council Awards in 2022. I didn't get a chance to read it last year but when Alan and Unwin sent me this one, thank you very much to them, I was very excited to go back and read the first book and then read the second one and share it with you. In the first book, Huda and Me, it is about two siblings, Huda and Akil, who are fifth and sixth out of seven children in their family. Their parents have had to travel overseas to Lebanon to visit with their grandparents because their grandmother is ill and they've left all seven children under the care of a family friend who as it turns out is not the best carer and kind of treats the kids like servants and has them do all sorts of things for her so that she doesn't have to do them herself. In this story, Huda is a very determined, very action-conscious young girl and she concocts a plan and drags Akil into it, he's a little bit older than her, to purchase tickets to fly to Lebanon, to find their parents and let them know what's going on because they haven't been able to get in contact with them and what follows is their adventure traveling from Melbourne, Australia, all the way to Lebanon on two flights connecting via Dubai to find their parents and it's their adventures, the hijinks that ensue, the story is told in a dual timeline so you get what's happened in the past and what's currently happening as they're traveling and it really reveals kind of what a force of nature Huda is as a character. She is, yeah, a force to be reckoned with despite being the younger of the two, she's the one that comes up with the plan, she enacts it, she doesn't let Akil back out of it at the last minute and she's thinking two, three, four steps ahead of everyone around her. Huda and me is a gorgeous story of family and sibling love, it is about determination and even though you've got kids running away, they've got a purpose and they're trying to make things right. It's also a beautiful exploration of Muslim culture and belief and the way that this particular Muslim family practices their faith and the characters are larger than life. I loved meeting all of the siblings, you get to see all of their personalities on page and interestingly enough, I was reading some information about the author H Hayek and all of the members of Huda's family are named for the author's family members because she also comes from a family of seven children and she's the second youngest and she's written that even though the stories themselves might be made up, the characters and the family is not and you can tell because they just leap off the page. Which brings us to the most recent release, Huda was here and in this one, Huda is now nine and a half years old, Akil is 12 and their father has just been fired from his job working as a body corporate security officer for their community and of course this leads to financial stress on their family that the kids are dealing with and eventually their dad finds a new job however it's in Fremantle which is all the way on the other side of the country and if you are not familiar with the geography of Australia, Fremantle is in western Australia which is a very very long distance from Melbourne and of course this devastates the family and the kids because they don't want their dad to leave and their mum steps up and she has to get a job and suddenly things are different around the house because everyone is busy and everyone is trying to make do with living in a single parent household for the time being and there are seven kids including an infant and of course Huda, our force of nature is back with a new plan, she has plans to get her father back and she drags Akil along for the ride again this time she has decided that because her father was fired because there was no crime in the community she and Akil are going to cause some mischief in the neighborhood via some small acts of vandalism to force the community to realise that they need their father back along the way they make some new friends we get to meet more members of their local community and Huda and Akil unintentionally uncover a little bit of body corporate espionage going on in the background so this one is a real adventure through the local community as I said we get to meet more characters we get to learn more about their family and we get to see the connections between all of the siblings in even more depth we get to learn a little bit more about Huda and Akil at school because they're both in primary school as it turns out their mum gets a job as an integration aid at the school and this is very stifling for Huda and Akil who realise that having mum at school all the time may not work out well for them I think what I like most about this one is it's a good one that to use as a class novel or to use as a jumping off point for talking about actions and consequences because they're committing these small acts of vandalism because they want their father to come back home but they're still breaking the law and there are consequences for them in this story but the one thing you learn about Huda as you read both of these books she is just a young woman of action and yes she might have thought things through and she know and she understands that there is right and wrong but she also has a very firm belief in her family and she wants to protect her family at all costs in both books as I said earlier we have wonderful muslim representation it's so nice to see these books and these stories being written to not only help other people understand muslim faith but also for our muslim kids in schools to see themselves reflected in stories especially in contemporary stories and in a really positive light admittedly as an adult reading this I am wondering how on earth they got away with all of the antics that happened in this book but at the same time it was a wild ride and really fun and I thoroughly enjoyed it so thank you again to Alan Nunwin for sending me a copy of Huda was here and for prompting me to go back and actually read Huda and me as well because I thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience I will leave links to where you can check out both books and the author down below so if you are interested you can definitely go and check those out if you have read either of these books feel free to chat to me about them in the comments and if you just want to let me know that you're here but you don't want to leave a comment feel free to leave a toilet paper roll emoji down below I hope that we're here on the world you're staying safe and healthy and I will see you all in my next video thanks so much for watching bye everyone