Summary: A Bengali girl tries to find a way to help her family meet their expenses.
Rickshaw Girl is an elementary-level book about a Bengali girl and her family. It has been recently adapted into a movie done well at several film festivals but has not been widely released yet. The trailer is available here. The trailer has clear adaptations, which is not surprising since the original book is short and intended for early readers.
The original book, published ten years ago, was one of the early novels by Mitali Perkins. I first heard about MItali Perkins in this podcast interview. Since then, I have read three young adult novels and this elementary-level novel. I knew about the book but had not purchased it until I saw that it was on sale for kindle. So last night, I read it after putting my kids to bed. As an adult, it is a short and simple book. But it is right in the level to read alongside my kids. Once we are finished with our current book, I plan to re-read this with my children.
The main character, Naima, is the oldest child. She has completed three years of school and is a talented artist, winning awards for her painting. But she had to leave school because the family could only afford to send one child to school at a time. Her father is a Rickshaw driver and recently took out a loan to buy a new Rickshaw. But his health has been poor, and he is having difficulty earning enough money to support the family and make the payments. Naima’s best friend, a boy who lives next door, who she is being encouraged to no longer spend time with because they are early teens and it is no longer proper, is able to drive his father’s rickshaw part-time to give his father a break and to earn some money. This makes Naima wish that she were a boy so that she might also be able to earn money for the family, but there are no jobs open to her as a girl. This leads her to work through ways that she might be able to earn money for the family, albeit in ways that are not proper to her culture.
Stop here if you do not want to read spoilers for the rest of the story (I recommend the book.)…..
Naima attempts to ride the rickshaw to see if she could somehow take it out for her father. But she loses control of it, and there is minor damage to the rickshaw. She is disappointed that she did not help the family and caused more expenses. Her father agrees to sell some of her mother’s jewelry to pay for repairs causing her shame. It takes some convincing, but Naima goes to the repair shop that her father is going to, a new shop that has just reopened, and her father hopes will give him a good deal. Naima hopes that she can agree to paint or do other work in exchange for part of the cost of the repairs. She borrows some boys’ clothes on the assumption that the shop will not allow a girl to work at the shop.
Naima finds a widow who learned the repair trade from her father. The widow’s brothers did not continue in the trade, and after her father and husband passed away, she decided to re-open her father’s shop with the help of a women’s micro-loan. Mitali Perkins has a history of writing to raise awareness, and this book is in part raising awareness about microcredit and working with Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank who recieved the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
When I re-read this with my kids, we will talk about cultural gender roles, caring for your family, the reality of poverty, and likely other issues that my children raise. One of my children, I think, will be able to read this by themself and the other is not quite ready to read alone, but this will be appropriate to read together.
As I am posting this, the kindle edition is $1.99. The paperback is only $4.95. The audiobook is too expensive for just over an hour of content at $10.95 or an Audible credit.
Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins Purchase Links: Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook, Paperback