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Sarah
Hope is how this book can be defined.
Afghanistan is in the post-Taliban era where society is recovering young Sarah is exposed to television for the first time. And for the first time, the glimpse of western women, a bad ass heroine who rides a bike and kicks asses. The totally contrasting image of a woman from her society consumes Sarah until she becomes obsessed. Hatching a plan with her best Friend Shakip, she dreams of eloping from her hometown and going to Hollywood to become the same.
But the ground reality is opposite the practice of Bacha posh (small girls living like a boy to hide their identity) and the early marriage system of girls in their teenage. Sparks anger in the heart of Sarah she finds solace in the shadow of first female warlord commander pigeon.
The journey from a naive hopeful girl to a fighter soon the line between reel life and real life gets blurred and the never-dying hope and rebellious nature oh her becomes her hamartia leading her to tragic ends.
Afghanistan is in the post-Taliban era where society is recovering young Sarah is exposed to television for the first time. And for the first time, the glimpse of western women, a bad ass heroine who rides a bike and kicks asses. The totally contrasting image of a woman from her society consumes Sarah until she becomes obsessed. Hatching a plan with her best Friend Shakip, she dreams of eloping from her hometown and going to Hollywood to become the same.
But the ground reality is opposite the practice of Bacha posh (small girls living like a boy to hide their identity) and the early marriage system of girls in their teenage. Sparks anger in the heart of Sarah she finds solace in the shadow of first female warlord commander pigeon.
The journey from a naive hopeful girl to a fighter soon the line between reel life and real life gets blurred and the never-dying hope and rebellious nature oh her becomes her hamartia leading her to tragic ends.
191 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 9, 2017
About the author
Yarro Rai
20 books439 followersYarro Rai is an Amazon Best Seller, Indian Nepali author and poet known for emotionally intense fiction, poetic realism, and raw storytelling. His work has earned a fast-growing, loyal readership drawn to stories of love, trauma, guilt, fame, and the inner lives of complex characters.
Rai’s acclaimed novels: Never Meant to Be, Vice and Virtue, Prayers' of Enna, and Beyond Passion and Dreams blend literary depth with gripping, character-driven narratives. Through his signature mix of lyrical prose and psychological intimacy, he explores themes of identity, relationships, memory, and the fragile truths people carry through life.
As his books continue reaching new audiences Yarro Rai has become one of the rising contemporary voices in South Asian literary fiction. His writing style is quiet, uncompromised, and deeply immersive. The kind of storytelling that builds a cult following rather than chasing the spotlight.
Yarro writes not to sell, but to reveal. He doesn’t bend his voice for the market; instead, he leans into the kind of storytelling that unsettles quietly and stays with readers long after the final page.
"I just write to maintain my sanity and make my existence in this rotting world bearable. PEACE"
Rai’s acclaimed novels: Never Meant to Be, Vice and Virtue, Prayers' of Enna, and Beyond Passion and Dreams blend literary depth with gripping, character-driven narratives. Through his signature mix of lyrical prose and psychological intimacy, he explores themes of identity, relationships, memory, and the fragile truths people carry through life.
As his books continue reaching new audiences Yarro Rai has become one of the rising contemporary voices in South Asian literary fiction. His writing style is quiet, uncompromised, and deeply immersive. The kind of storytelling that builds a cult following rather than chasing the spotlight.
Yarro writes not to sell, but to reveal. He doesn’t bend his voice for the market; instead, he leans into the kind of storytelling that unsettles quietly and stays with readers long after the final page.
"I just write to maintain my sanity and make my existence in this rotting world bearable. PEACE"
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 21, 2017
‘Like a soul of a gypsy woman in the body of a ten year old girl.’
Indian author Yarro rai was born in India, bred in a village with mixed race and color. As he states, he barely escaped the family tradition of joining the Army, preferring prose and poetry more than guns and bullets. He has first-hand experience of raw India and the struggle of a lower middle class. His struggle continues: growing up with a spark of imagination was hard, where society still favors the traditional job seeking process, and being an artist is a taboo. The RARE GIRL SERIES, of which this is the first book, is the reflection of that voice. As Yarro explains, ‘I have always been turned on by female characters. And even though in this era Hollywood and other media to deal with women driven characters but I have always felt that they are too sexualized in order to market. I mean as a man I don’t mind everybody loves seeing powerful and sexy female lead but as I travel around I find many average females who look nothing like Hollywood stars and yet they carry such strong characters. I have witnessed such things where they have changed a man’s life be it saving a husband life or standing up for her daughters. These women in the corner of worlds they hide among us leading a very ordinary life just like superheroes do. So, I wanted to write a series dedicated to this kind of women - just pure story and no-nonsense.’
Yarro rai’s writing is free form thought. Yes, the story is there, the characters are there, but the transmission of thought, of conversation, of feelings is more like a and extended poem. His ability to paint images vividly is a strong point and those images and the atmosphere in which he places his characters is powerful enough to overlook the grammatical and structural stumbles we encounter as we ride into his world and his Sarah.
Yarro’s poetry, already well established, is a constant in this book. He opens with
Listen to the prayer of a young girl.
Give me the wings of the falcon
So the sky can love me.
The world beyond the horizon awaits me,
But I am married to the past.
Give me the wings of the falcon
So the sky can love me.
The author provides a window into the story – ‘Hope is how this book can be defined. Afghanistan is in the post-Taliban era where society is recovering. Young Sarah is exposed to television for the first time. And for the first time, the glimpse of western women, a hard heroine who rides a bike and kicks butt. The totally contrasting image of a woman consumes Sarah until she becomes obsessed. With the help of her best friend Shakip, she dreams of eloping from her hometown and going to Hollywood to become the same. But the ground reality is opposite the practice of Bacha posh (small girls living like a boy to hide their identity) and the early marriage system of girls in their teenage years. Anger sparks in the heart of Sarah and she finds solace in the shadow of first female warlord commander pigeon. The journey from a naive hopeful girl to a fighter. Soon the line between reel life and real life gets blurred and the never-dying hope and rebellious nature in her becomes her hamartia, leading her to tragic ends.’
There is creativity here and commitment to a passion. If this first book has its problems, doubtless the author will find a companion editor to make the following books more accessible to a larger Western audience.
Indian author Yarro rai was born in India, bred in a village with mixed race and color. As he states, he barely escaped the family tradition of joining the Army, preferring prose and poetry more than guns and bullets. He has first-hand experience of raw India and the struggle of a lower middle class. His struggle continues: growing up with a spark of imagination was hard, where society still favors the traditional job seeking process, and being an artist is a taboo. The RARE GIRL SERIES, of which this is the first book, is the reflection of that voice. As Yarro explains, ‘I have always been turned on by female characters. And even though in this era Hollywood and other media to deal with women driven characters but I have always felt that they are too sexualized in order to market. I mean as a man I don’t mind everybody loves seeing powerful and sexy female lead but as I travel around I find many average females who look nothing like Hollywood stars and yet they carry such strong characters. I have witnessed such things where they have changed a man’s life be it saving a husband life or standing up for her daughters. These women in the corner of worlds they hide among us leading a very ordinary life just like superheroes do. So, I wanted to write a series dedicated to this kind of women - just pure story and no-nonsense.’
Yarro rai’s writing is free form thought. Yes, the story is there, the characters are there, but the transmission of thought, of conversation, of feelings is more like a and extended poem. His ability to paint images vividly is a strong point and those images and the atmosphere in which he places his characters is powerful enough to overlook the grammatical and structural stumbles we encounter as we ride into his world and his Sarah.
Yarro’s poetry, already well established, is a constant in this book. He opens with
Listen to the prayer of a young girl.
Give me the wings of the falcon
So the sky can love me.
The world beyond the horizon awaits me,
But I am married to the past.
Give me the wings of the falcon
So the sky can love me.
The author provides a window into the story – ‘Hope is how this book can be defined. Afghanistan is in the post-Taliban era where society is recovering. Young Sarah is exposed to television for the first time. And for the first time, the glimpse of western women, a hard heroine who rides a bike and kicks butt. The totally contrasting image of a woman consumes Sarah until she becomes obsessed. With the help of her best friend Shakip, she dreams of eloping from her hometown and going to Hollywood to become the same. But the ground reality is opposite the practice of Bacha posh (small girls living like a boy to hide their identity) and the early marriage system of girls in their teenage years. Anger sparks in the heart of Sarah and she finds solace in the shadow of first female warlord commander pigeon. The journey from a naive hopeful girl to a fighter. Soon the line between reel life and real life gets blurred and the never-dying hope and rebellious nature in her becomes her hamartia, leading her to tragic ends.’
There is creativity here and commitment to a passion. If this first book has its problems, doubtless the author will find a companion editor to make the following books more accessible to a larger Western audience.
October 15, 2017
Set against the backdrop of post-Taliban Afghanistan, 'Sarah' is the first book in the Rare Girl series by Yarro Rai. It follows the life of the titular character from childhood to adolescence, as told through the eyes of Shakip - her best friend, and the boy who loves her.
As a narrator Shakip is immediately likeable. There is a charm to his storytelling throughout the entire story, despite his questionable actions toward the end of the novel, and the childlike awe he feels for Sarah at age 10 never really goes away as he grows older. Sarah is likeable from the start as well. Defiant, sharpening and spitting on rocks to defend her gender against the neighbourhood males, letting her hair blow in the wind, fierce and focused as the falcon she sporadically sings about throughout the text. Her childhood fixation with the “bad ass” heroines of Hollywood films, seen through Shakip's television set (one of only two in the village), is endearing at first but grows to consume her as the text progresses, eventually becoming an obsession which drives the plot of the novel and leaves the characters to deal with consequences beyond their imaginings.
Shakip's narration throughout the whole of 'Sarah' is utterly believable, despite some of the dramatic events of the story. His actions, though sometimes inexplicable to himself, are those of an adolescent boy deep in the throes of a life-long crush. The novel fails when we are transported to present-day Shakip, whom we see in third-person. I won't give too much away except to say that he is living the outlandish life of one of the Hollywood movies Sarah is so enamoured with. There are places in which the syntax is wrong, or the wording not quite correct but I believe the clumsiness of the text, in places, works to its favour, lending credibility to the idea that the text is a work of translation, that it is coming from the mind of a ten-year-old, or an adolescent. The choice of first-person present tense for most of the text cements this. I'd like to share a few of my favourite sentences:
“She can really get on your nerves and make you eat your own brain, especially when you have feelings for her."
"She almost pukes her voice onto Sarah."
“The sensitivity of her heart oozing out of her eyes."
These were such a pleasure to read and had me laughing aloud. Other lines are feel genuine in an entirely different way, poignant in their earnestness and a sort of adolescent insight: “Maybe love is also called fear, fear of losing the one you love.”
There are also sentences like: “Now I am forgotten for a few hours as I sit beside her, watching movie with her.” The simplicity and missed word in this absolutely endears it to me, I can so vividly picture a young boy using these words! However, from the same page, we also get the sentence: “Sarah eyes are attentive as she speaks in her astonished and overwhelmed voice.” which clearly could have benefited from a rewrite to trim some of the superfluous adverbs. And sometimes, the text is just a missing set of quotation marks and the reader is left without a sense of closure, or the wrong word has been used and not picked up by the editor.
I can say with all honesty that 'Sarah' is a genuinely interesting read. From the beginning, the worldbuilding is exquisite. The passion that underpins the narration is in evidence too. Sarah is such a vivid character: this Afghan girl in love with Hollywood film, so fierce that she buffets trees with her bare fists until they bleed, but so sweet to her goat that she will carry it in her arms and give it nothing but sweet words. She is a dreamer and Shakip is swept up into her fantasy of becoming a famous actress starring in action films, and the two of them together draw a picture that will stay with me for a long time.
I am glad that I read 'Sarah', and though I feel it could have benefited from a couple of extra revisions to become something truly polished, this would endanger the aspects of the book which I admired and which made it so special to read.
As a narrator Shakip is immediately likeable. There is a charm to his storytelling throughout the entire story, despite his questionable actions toward the end of the novel, and the childlike awe he feels for Sarah at age 10 never really goes away as he grows older. Sarah is likeable from the start as well. Defiant, sharpening and spitting on rocks to defend her gender against the neighbourhood males, letting her hair blow in the wind, fierce and focused as the falcon she sporadically sings about throughout the text. Her childhood fixation with the “bad ass” heroines of Hollywood films, seen through Shakip's television set (one of only two in the village), is endearing at first but grows to consume her as the text progresses, eventually becoming an obsession which drives the plot of the novel and leaves the characters to deal with consequences beyond their imaginings.
Shakip's narration throughout the whole of 'Sarah' is utterly believable, despite some of the dramatic events of the story. His actions, though sometimes inexplicable to himself, are those of an adolescent boy deep in the throes of a life-long crush. The novel fails when we are transported to present-day Shakip, whom we see in third-person. I won't give too much away except to say that he is living the outlandish life of one of the Hollywood movies Sarah is so enamoured with. There are places in which the syntax is wrong, or the wording not quite correct but I believe the clumsiness of the text, in places, works to its favour, lending credibility to the idea that the text is a work of translation, that it is coming from the mind of a ten-year-old, or an adolescent. The choice of first-person present tense for most of the text cements this. I'd like to share a few of my favourite sentences:
“She can really get on your nerves and make you eat your own brain, especially when you have feelings for her."
"She almost pukes her voice onto Sarah."
“The sensitivity of her heart oozing out of her eyes."
These were such a pleasure to read and had me laughing aloud. Other lines are feel genuine in an entirely different way, poignant in their earnestness and a sort of adolescent insight: “Maybe love is also called fear, fear of losing the one you love.”
There are also sentences like: “Now I am forgotten for a few hours as I sit beside her, watching movie with her.” The simplicity and missed word in this absolutely endears it to me, I can so vividly picture a young boy using these words! However, from the same page, we also get the sentence: “Sarah eyes are attentive as she speaks in her astonished and overwhelmed voice.” which clearly could have benefited from a rewrite to trim some of the superfluous adverbs. And sometimes, the text is just a missing set of quotation marks and the reader is left without a sense of closure, or the wrong word has been used and not picked up by the editor.
I can say with all honesty that 'Sarah' is a genuinely interesting read. From the beginning, the worldbuilding is exquisite. The passion that underpins the narration is in evidence too. Sarah is such a vivid character: this Afghan girl in love with Hollywood film, so fierce that she buffets trees with her bare fists until they bleed, but so sweet to her goat that she will carry it in her arms and give it nothing but sweet words. She is a dreamer and Shakip is swept up into her fantasy of becoming a famous actress starring in action films, and the two of them together draw a picture that will stay with me for a long time.
I am glad that I read 'Sarah', and though I feel it could have benefited from a couple of extra revisions to become something truly polished, this would endanger the aspects of the book which I admired and which made it so special to read.
December 14, 2017
Sarah is a truly inspiring and unique novel. The story is centered entirely around the heroine Sarah, however it is told through her childhood friend Shakip who is both the hero and the villain of the story. Sarah as a young rebel filled with dreams had always fascinated Shakip. Shakip was a conservative weakling who found inspiration in Sarah's face even to engage in wicked deeds. However, his love for Sarah is true. He tries to follow the motto that everything is fair in love and war and this proves to be his undoing. There are other important characters in the novel such as the mothers of the two main characters and Khalid and Mullah. Sarah does get to live her dream in the real life, however, this dream is not what Shakip or Sarah had imagined.
Sarah is complex, deep and psychologically and emotionally touching. The climax for me was the letter which Sarah had left for Shakip where she confesses her love for her friend just before she sneaks away to meet her mother. The statement made by Yarro Rai is strong as the portrait of middle east is painted in colorful and vibrant hues. This is a love story with a difference and the end is poignant.
Sarah is complex, deep and psychologically and emotionally touching. The climax for me was the letter which Sarah had left for Shakip where she confesses her love for her friend just before she sneaks away to meet her mother. The statement made by Yarro Rai is strong as the portrait of middle east is painted in colorful and vibrant hues. This is a love story with a difference and the end is poignant.
January 10, 2018
In a way, this story reminded me a bit of Persepolis, because of the main character’s love of western culture that clashes with her own culture and rearing. At times, reading this book feels like a prison because the main character is restrained in such a way, even if she doesn’t hide her love of Hollywood from the other villagers. It is great to see a hero born out of such a situation though, as the character grows up to be a very inspiring woman. I feel this book represents so many women that may be fighting today, which is why the story gets five stars from me. It is powerfully written and gives hope in one of the darkest times. However, the author could really use some more editing here as the errors take away a lot from the story. I feel, the future additions to this series could be outstanding if the author improves on this one element.
December 15, 2017
Sarah is narrated by the boy who grew up loving her, and her crazy ways, Shakip. He introduces her to the Western world through his tiny TV set. Sarah’s wild imagination takes over, and the others in this third world village often think she is possessed by a devil.
I find this novel humorous in a sad, raw sort of way. Sarah’s simple understanding of the Western world allows her to see the horrors of the traditions she had been born into. She has resolved to never become like her friend who was forced to marry a man twice her age when she was barely a teenager. Her friend ended up committing suicide out of desperation, but Sarah has chosen to fight. She fought gender prejudice until the end. She became a voice for women, even when they would rather submit to injustice.
I find this novel humorous in a sad, raw sort of way. Sarah’s simple understanding of the Western world allows her to see the horrors of the traditions she had been born into. She has resolved to never become like her friend who was forced to marry a man twice her age when she was barely a teenager. Her friend ended up committing suicide out of desperation, but Sarah has chosen to fight. She fought gender prejudice until the end. She became a voice for women, even when they would rather submit to injustice.
October 12, 2017
This novel was very engaging, the writing style was so descriptive and absorbing. I NEEDED to find out what was going to happen. I think that's what a good writer does - makes you feel so deeply for the characters that it will just keep you turning pages until you have devoured the entire book. I know I did.
A recommended read
A recommended read
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews