When Wings Expand

 When Wings Expand,
Paperback - 220 pages,
by Mehded Maryam Sinclair.


Description :

A 12-year-old Canadian Muslim girl chronicles the death of her terminally ill mother and her slow healing.

When the book opens, Nur’s mother has been sick for months, and treatments seem to be going nowhere. Nur picks up the diary her mother gave her and names it “Buraq” after the animal that flew Prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, from Makkah to Jerusalem. The piety that guides her here carries her through the gut-wrenching grief that is to follow, as does the discovery of some monarch butterfly chrysalises. Nur’s Baba tells her that “Allah has made everything in a pattern. He said people are part of that pattern too. Just like chrysalises don’t stay the same, people don’t stay the same either.”

Nur is so good, pious, and ingenuous her grief and her rage never feel false, they are so quickly mitigated by her faith, at first mediated by her devout parents (her mother dies with “Allah” on her lips) and later on her own, that she seems more a perfect role model for a child grieving in Islam.

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_{Fiction : Categorised as Self-Development for teenagers and the role of the Muslim family in dealing with death.}