But daily life isn’t all that she records. In it, she writes to her mother who died during her and her twin brother’s birth. It’s a place where she can record her thoughts, the things she thinks about but seems to have problems saying aloud. Nisha receives a blank journal from her family’s cook on her twelfth birthday. Today we are featuring The Night Diaryby Veera Hiranandani. Ages 8 12.Welcome to Windows & Mirrors, where we feature books that provide us windows to lives outside our own and mirrors to our shared common human experiences. The diary format gives her story striking intimacy and immediacy, serving as a window into a fraught historical moment as Nisha grapples with issues of identity and the search for a home that remain quite timely. But when her family is no longer safe in their home in the city of Mirpur Khas (which became part of Pakistan), they set out for 'the new India.' Hiranandani (The Whole Story of Half a Girl) places Nisha's coming of age against the violent birth of a nation. As the daughter of a Hindu father and a Muslim mother, Nisha questions which side of the Indian-Pakistani border to call her own. Nisha's journal entries, which are addressed to her deceased mother, take on new urgency as she witnesses India being 'split in half like a log' along religious lines after gaining independence from Britain. Told through Nisha's letters to her mother, The Night Diary is a heartfelt story of one girl's search for home, for her own identity.and for a hopeful future.Īfter introverted Nisha receives a diary for her 12th birthday, she begins to find her voice as she documents her family's upheaval amid the 1947 Partition of India.

But even if her country has been ripped apart, Nisha still believes in the possibility of putting herself back together. The journey is long, difficult, and dangerous, and after losing her mother as a baby, Nisha can't imagine losing her homeland, too. When Papa decides it's too dangerous to stay in what is now Pakistan, Nisha and her family become refugees and embark first by train but later on foot to reach her new home. Half-Muslim, half-Hindu twelve-year-old Nisha doesn't know where she belongs, or what her country is anymore.

The divide has created much tension between Hindus and Muslims, and hundreds of thousands are killed crossing borders. It's 1947, and India, newly independent of British rule, has been separated into two countries: Pakistan and India. In the vein of Inside Out and Back Again and The War That Saved My Life comes a poignant, personal, and hopeful tale of India's partition, and of one girl's journey to find a new home in a divided country 'A gripping, nuanced story of the human cost of conflict appropriate for both children and adults.'

Nisha from the night diary