Aisha Saeed's Blog

With summer vacation fully underway hanging out with my three boys and squeezing in writing time has been keeping me quite busy but I’m happy to have some time now to share some amazing updates for AMAL UNBOUND. Thank you so much for supporting this book, for buying it and recommending it to your local libraries and reviewing it. It means so much to me. Without further ado:

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Thrilled to share that AMAL UNBOUND now has four starred reviews. The latest one is from School Library Journal which...

Completely honored and humbled to share that AMAL UNBOUND was selected a Global Read Aloud for 2018. The most rewarding part of being an author is the chance to interact with teachers and students (once a teacher always a teacher) and so this honor of being selected for GRA2018 is a huge one for me. You can read more details about Global Read Aloud and all the other amazing books selected here.

Thrilled to share that Kirkus has given Amal Unbound a starred review! They said in part:

Saeed’s timely and stirring middle-grade debut is a celebration of resistance and justice.

You can read the full review here.

 

AMAL UNBOUND got it’s first trade review and it’s a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly!

A few excerpts:

Saeed (Written in the Stars) infuses this true-to-life story of unjust power dynamics in a poor Pakistani village with a palpable sense of dread regarding the fate of the inquisitive, industrious, poetry-loving titular character.

And:

Saeed’s eloquent, suspenseful, eye-opening tale offers a window into the contemporary practice of indentured servitude and makes a compelling case for the...

Many many thanks to the lovely and patient and incredibly creative Diana Sousa who designed and redid my website to make it the beautiful thing you are checking out today! Thank you, Diana!  I really cannot recommend her enough, if you’re looking to get a website done or design bookmarks, etc, her portfolio is here.

I’m a pretty regular twitter user but I thought it was time to have a place for bookish related news and fun stuff so here goes a few book related updates!

AMAL UNBOUND is a JLG...

[image error]I had the pleasure of going to the Virginia Children’s Book Festival in Farmville, VA this past weekend. Since I’m “between books” (my Young Adult novel came out in 2015 and my middle grade pubs May 2018) this year has been a bit slower as far as book-related travel goes. And while I had done some panels and conferences this year like AWP and SCBWI LA it had been a minute since I’d done school visits. The Virginia Children’s Book Festival is a festival truly for children. It was a multi-day e...

Well, hello there. It's, um. Been a while. 

A lot has happened since the last time I posted. And by lot I mean the world feels like its flipped upside down. [Though, of course, that's not what happened. The fog simply lifted. I see now what was always there.]

Times are tough. Things are hard. There's no sugar coating that. But we keep on keeping on because it's what we do. We have stories to write, dinner to make, and diapers to change.

Seriously though. So. Many. Diapers

After my third son...

I don't know how to write this without crying.

So I'll cry and I'll write.

It's summer break. I wake up to baby snuggles. Afternoons I clean up the goop left behind from three year olds intent on making their own PB&Js because I'm a big boy now thank you very much, and then I cuddle each evening with all three and hear my newly literate eldest son read me stories before bed.

It's also Ramadan. The kids settle in most mornings with crayons and glitter for Ramadan cards to exchange with frie...

Sunny Saturday morning of gardening, trimming, errands at large.
First weekend in town in weeks.

And then the text from a friend.
Air show! Come!

Fussy baby. Busy day. But the children plead, so we ergo the baby, zip in water bottles, and
pull in just in time to catch the last bit of the show.

Look at the view!
We're on the runway!
The planes are so close!
Watch them go down! Back up again.

Grand Finale, the announcer bellows. This last one is a surprise.

Two planes.
One blue, the other green, race thro...

Once upon a time I read a lot. I kept meticulous notes and reviewed every single book on my book reviewing website [now defunct]. Most years I read 50-70 books. One year I topped out at 100. I know many people read far more books than this in a year, but I’m not the fastest reader and I was pretty satisfied with this reading level. Then things changed. Reading dropped. A lot. There were likely a number of factors:

a) burning out after the year I read 100 books [that is a lot of books for me]
b...