That Night's Train - Hardcover

Akbarpour, Ahmad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1554981697 ISBN 13: 9781554981694

Publisher: Groundwood Books, 2012

Synopsis

On a train trip with her grandmother, young Banafsheh meets a woman who reminds her of her dead mother. The woman is a teacher and a writer, and she promises she will call Banafsheh and come and tell her stories. Later, the teacher weaves the encounter into a story that she tells to the children in her classroom. The children are entranced by the story and imagine how it will turn out. Surely, they say, the teacher will call the little girl.

But the teacher never calls, though Banafsheh waits faithfully by the phone and refuses even to go out to play. Meanwhile, the teacher is disconcerted by her class’s reaction, and she agonizes over how to end her story. As a writer, she feels that the story is more important than anything else, and that the ending must be exciting and eventful, no matter what. Perhaps Banafsheh will even have to become ill and die?

In the end, the teacher does visit Banafsheh, but finds that it is too little too late. Banafsheh is very angry with the teacher, and hurt. Finally, the teacher makes the biggest sacrifice she knows — her manuscript — in order to save the friendship.

This is a thought-provoking and emotionally powerful novel that raises intriguing and child-friendly questions about how real life and stories are interwoven, who owns stories, and whether they can ever truly disappear.

About this title

About the Author:

Ahmad Akbarpour is a novelist, short-story writer and author of children’s books. He has won the Iranian National Book Award and was selected for the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) honor list in 2006. He is the author of the picture book Good Night, Commander, illustrated by Morteza Zahedi (Groundwood, 2010). He lives in Shiraz, Iran.

From Booklist:

It starts out oh so simply. A five-year-old girl named Banafsheh, who has lost her mother, is taking a night train home when she meets a kindly teacher. Banafsheh thinks, I knew God would send me a mother. The teacher promises to call Banafsheh soon. And then things get meta. The book so far, we learn, is a story that a teacher is reading to her fifth-grade students, who suspect an upcoming terrible twist. Now back to the plot, where Banafsheh’s father tells her a story within a story about an old man. This story, we later learn, was written by the teacher. Even later, we discover that the story of the old man wasn’t a story at all—it was real and the teacher was, perhaps irresponsibly, altering the facts. Lost? That’s all right. Akbarpour’s prose is as clear as the plot is complicated, and tracking the sense of every self-reflexive jag is less important than basking in the overall glow. A gentle, hopeful tale about truth, storytelling, and the restrictions of living a scripted life. Grades 2-4. --Daniel Kraus

About this edition

• Publisher: Groundwood Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1554981697
• ISBN 13: 9781554981694
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96
• Illustrator: Arsenault Isabelle