Saadia Faruqi

"When her grandmother comes off the airplane in Houston from Pakistan, Mahnoor knows that having Dadi move in is going to disrupt everything about her life. She doesn't have time to be Dadi's unofficial babysitter: her journalism teacher has announced that their big assignment will be to film a documentary, which feels more like storytelling than what Maha would call 'journalism.' As Dadi starts to settle into life in Houston and Maha scrambles for...

With her eighth birthday coming up, Marya claims she is having an epic henna party, so now she must convince her family to make it happen and work to pull it off, but everything Marya does seems to end in disaster.

"Marya loves fall. Every year, her family goes to the town's fall festival and picks out the best pumpkin. But this year, after she sees her frenemy Alexa winning a big, cool pumpkin-shaped trophy, Marya knows she's got to win a trophy for something. It just so happens that her school is going to hold its own fall festival, with games and food and even a hayride. All the ticket sales will go to an animal shelter, and the person who sells the most...

Told in two voices, eleven-year-olds Mimi, who is visiting her wealthy grandparents in Karachi, Pakistan, for the first time and Sakina, daughter of the grandparents' cook, form an unexpected friendship.--

When Ms. Alex is called away from the classroom, she leaves Yasmin in charge, but the other children just ignore her and start acting silly and noisy--until Yasmin thinks up a way to motivate them to finish the math assignment, quietly.

Second grader Ali Tahir considers himself to be a dinosaur expert, but on a class field trip to the natural history museum, Ali keeps getting his facts wrong, and is embarrassed in front of his friends and classmates.

After Yasmin and her father spend the day working on a large jigsaw puzzle, her father does not feel well the next morning. Doctor Yasmin is sure she can diagnose the problem, and prescribe a cure!

Yasmin's family is hosting a big party, but Yasmin is worried that the traditional food her family is cooking is too spicy--so her family challenges Yasmin to come up with a dish of her own.

On her family's visit to a farm, Yasmin is thrilled to play with the baby chicks, but when she forgets to close the pen door and one goes missing, Yasmin has to scramble to find it.

In this compilation of four separately published books, Pakistani American second grader Yasmin learns to cope with the small problems of school and home, while gaining confidence in her own skills and creative abilities.