In this poignant memoir of a childhood in Ramallah, on the West Bank, Bakarat offers a child's view of the daily indignities, oppression, and textures of life in an occupied land. The starting point for her letters to the world is her detention, on the way home from the university, where she has gone to check a mailbox for news of the world. And what she recalls-the terrors of the Six-Day War; the privations of refugees (she particularly dislikes lentils!); the sense of possibility that she discovered in the first letter of the Arabic alphabet-is recorded matter-of-factly, in a plain style accessible to readers from seven to seventy-seven-and beyond.