Listen, Layla Book Tour

gifted item

I am so pleased to be today’s stop for the Listen, Layla book tour.

Listen, Layla is a book by Yassmin Abdel-Magied and I started to read it until Em spotted it and whisked it away! She was so engrossed she managed to read it all in one day!

You can see the details of the other tour hosts below.

About the Book

Listen, Layla is a story told from the perspective of Layla Kareem Abdel-Hafiz Hussein, a Sudanese Australian. School has finished for the long summer holidays and Layla plans to spend her time getting her inventions ready for the grand design competition.

Her grandmother falls ill and she and her family travel to Sudan to be with her and Layal feels torn. There’s a lot going on and there are protests looming in Sudan – can Layla save the day?

This book is interesting as it explores the experience of the Sudanese diaspora and I really like that this is an ‘own voice’ novel. Ideas of refugees and immigration are ideas we have tackled gently (due to the age of my children) but books like this and others that my older two have explored recently really help them to see the issues from a lived experience and perspective. This is so important, and it’s even more important that those in the same position as the character, can see their experience reflected.

About the Author

As mentioned, the author, Yassmin Abdel-Magied writes that as an ‘own voice’ author as so she is a Sudanese-born Australian writer, as well as a broadcaster and award-winning social advocate with a background in mechanical engineering. Yassmin founded her first organization, Youth Without Borders, at the age of sixteen, published her debut memoir, Yassmin’s Story, with Penguin Random House Australia at age twenty-four, and in 2019 followed up with her first fiction book for young readers, You Must Be Layla, which she is adapting for the screen.

Yassmin sounds incredible and she is a real advocate for the empowerment of women, youth and people of colour and she has been awarded numerous awards for her advocacy, including the 2018 Young Voltaire Award for Free Speech. She is right at the front of having the perceived difficult conversations and has traveled to over twenty countries speaking to governments, NGOs and multinational companies on a range of topics including unconscious bias, resilience and inclusive leadership. Her TED talk, ‘What does my headscarf mean to you?‘, has been viewed over two million times and was chosen as one of TED’s top ten ideas of 2015.

What Did We Think of the Book?

I haven’t yet finished the book as Em had it, but from what I have read so far I have enjoyed and hope to finish over the next day or two. Em really enjoyed this and read it in one day. We both liked the glossary at the back that helped us to understand some of the Arabic words and I think we may well do a project on Sudan following on from this book and look into the author, Yassmin, a little more and maybe do a short project on her given how much she has achieved. We will be ordering the first book, You Must Be Layla soon.