The Green Bicycle

Much of the violence here is emotional: A girl's life constricted because she's a girl, a wife dumped because she can't bear sons, teachers and a school system whose main goal seems to be bullying girls into conformity and submission. In one passage, Abdullah talks about how dying for Allah isn't supposed to hurt.

This is puritanical Saudi Arabia, so there's little more than flirtatious banter in the tale (between married people), and girls aren't allowed to touch the Quran if they're having their period. A girl sneaks off for a car ride with her boyfriend, is promptly busted by the religious police, and is confined to her house till her family can marry her off. A classmate of 11-year-old Wadjda gets married but continues to come to school. Two hip, fun-loving older girls are falsely accused of lesbianism. Male construction workers leer and shout crude remarks to Wadjda as she walks by the building site, which she finds strange and scary. Everybody in town seems to know the story of how, in her teenage days, the school's straitlaced principal was involved with a boy who narrowly escaped from her bedroom when her family interrupted the tryst. Wadjda is told girls aren't allowed to ride bikes, because, among other things, they won't be able to have children if they do. Also, bikes are a threat to "purity," causing Wadjda's mom to freak out when Wadjda's bleeding (from a skinned knee) after a bike mishap: "Oh, thank God it's only your knee! I can't imagine what we'd do if the fall had harmed your virginity."

Parents need to know that The Green Bicycle, Haifaa al Mansour's book version of her acclaimed film Wadjda, is the story of a spirited 11-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia, which is not the easiest place to be a spirited girl. Her best friend's a boy, he has a bike, and she wants one so they can race, but she quickly hits the wall of restrictive gender stereotypes that forbid girls to do any such thing. Meanwhile, her father's being pressured to take a second wife because Wadjda's mom can't bear sons. There are a lot of positive, uplifting messages here about family, friendship, loyalty, hard work, determination, and following your dreams and also some fleshing out of culturally significant details from the movie. The window into daily life in present-day Saudi Arabia will be a revelation to many Western kids, from the practical difficulties of commuting to work when you're forbidden to drive because you're a woman, to a Saudi stock-market crash that wiped out many people's life savings.