Tony O’Brien and Mike Sullivan introduce readers to children living in Kabul and in rural Afghan villages through intimate photographic portraits and brief narrative profiles that offer a glimpse of their lives and dreams. The introduction provides readers with a brief but essential grounding in the geography and current political turmoil of the Afghan nation as well as the ongoing war being fought there by the United States, and the poverty that dominates so many children’s lives. The faces and profiles that follow represent the hope that is Afghanistan’s future in a volume that will help children here put faces and stories with the name of a country that many will recognize from the news. (Ages 9–14)

Photojournalist O’Brien and Sullivan travelled to Afghanistan to in terview children between the ages of eight and fifteen, asking standard questions about their past, their families, and their everyday lives. They also inquired about their dreams and hopes for the future. Dreams and reality rarely coincided—as with education. “We walk two hours each way to school. We are very tired afterward, and it is hard to do our studies” (Kamilad, age fourteen, p. 61). Afghanistan is a land of beauty and hor rific scars—in its land and its citizens. Afghan Dreams: Young Voices of Af ghanistan brings the beauty, scars, and voices to life. ALA Notable Children’s Book, Bank Street Children’s Books of the Year, CCBC Choices, Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People (NCSS/CBC). lmp

If the stories that come out of Afghanistan are ever to contain hope for the future, then the young people readers will meet in these pages are that hope. From street workers to female students in newly formed academies, children who work in family businesses, and pickpockets who steal from visiting photographers, these are the faces of young Afghanis who universally wish for peace in their neighborhoods, in their country, in their lifetimes.

Award-winning photojournalist Tony O'Brien and filmmaker Mike Sullivan went to Afghanistan to interview and photograph children of a wide range of ages, from varied ethnic backgrounds, and with very different daily lives. As each one tells his or her story the reader is placed right in the middle of everyday life as it is lived by children in the midst of one of the world's most enduringly conflict-ridden countries.