The Shepherd's Granddaughter [Hardcover]

From the age of six, Amani has wanted to follow in her beloved grandfather’s footsteps and become a shepherd. Despite the tradition that only boys tend sheep, she is most at home on the mountains and among thes olive groves surrounding her home in Palestine, where her grandfather Seedo tutors her in shepherdry and life. Seedo surprises the family when he passes his crook to Amani, but she shines in her role as a 21st-century shepherd, e-mailing a government vet and incorporating the latest methods of animal husbandry into her world. Amani’s flock – and her family ­– are threatened, however, by encroaching Jewish settlements that occupy traditional grazing grounds and ultimately lead to the destruction of the family’s home and farmlands. In one frightening incident, Amani’s sheep are poisoned. When her uncle and father are jailed for opposing Israeli actions, help comes from unlikely sources, including a rabbi and Christian peacemakers, who enable Amani’s father to return and the family to rebuild. The Shepherd’s Granddaughter is a well-intentioned, very earnest narrative that aims to foster international harmony by educating young readers. (A portion of the book’s royalties will go to the Children in Crisis Fund of the International Board on Books.) Accordingly, the book invites parallels to the work of Deborah Ellis, but unlike Ellis, Anne Laurel Carter has trouble keeping her fiction from becoming secondary to the issues with which it grapples. Also, this novel has enough material for a whole series of books, and it gets overwhelmed by a series of underdeveloped subplots – Amani’s mystical encounters with a wolf and her budding crush on an American-born Jewish boy are two key examples – that fragment the narrative’s focus and undermine its realism. This is a shame, because Amani is a likably plucky character with whom readers will empathize.

". . . a hard – hitting, thought-provoking, troublesome book. The Shepherd’s Granddaughter centres upon the issue of Israeli-Palestinian relations and the on-going conflict over land. . . . Carter’s work provides and opportunity for middle and high school readers to gain further information about their world. . ." -- CM Magazine

Ever since she was a little girl, Amani has wanted to be a shepherd, just like her beloved grandfather, Sido. For generations her family has grazed sheep above the olive groves of the family homestead near Hebron, and she has been steeped in Sido's stories, especially one about a secret meadow called the Firdoos, where the grass is lush and the sheep grow fat, and about the wolf that once showed him the path there. But now Amani's family home is being threatened by encroaching Jewish settlements -- a highway, that they are not allowed to use, has been carved through her valley, and a fenced settlement is being built on the plateau overlooking their land. As Amani struggles to find increasingly rare grazing land for her starving sheep, her uncle and brother are tempted to take a more militant stance against the settlers.

Then she accidentally meets Jonathan, an American boy visiting his father, one of the settlers on Sido's Peak. Away from the pressures of their families, and despite their differences, the two young people discover Sido's secret meadow, the domain of a lone wolf. And Amani learns that she must share the meadow, and even her sheep, with the wolf, if she is going to continue to use it.

This is a moving novel about one of the most hotly disputed pieces of land on earth. Anne Carter tells the story of one girl and her family whose homes, way of life and livelihood -- even their ancient olive trees -- are threatened. She carefully avoids gratuitous sentimentalizing or politicizing by staying firmly behind the eyes of her young protagonist. Even as the political conflict and hostilities loom, Amani's life remains grounded in the incidents of everyday life -- the birth of a lamb, family arguments at mealtime, the illness of a faraway relative, the difficulties of travel, the celebration of the olive harvest.

Anne Carter lived on kibbutzim in Israel in the early seventies, where she milked cows and learned Hebrew. She returned to Israel in 2005 to teach creative writing in Ramallah and stayed with several Palestinian families while researching family life under the occupation for this novel. She has a Master of Education and currently works as a teacher-librarian in Toronto. Her young adult novel Last Chance Bay won the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award, and her picture book, Under a Prairie Sky (illustrated by Alan and Lea Daniel), won the Mr. Christie's Book Award. She has also written several titles in Penguin's Our Canadian Girl series.