The narrator comments that most people in Afghanistan cannot read or write. Parvana sits in silence at the back of his blanket in the marketplace and tries to make herself look small, hoping the Taliban won’t notice her and question her father about why she is outside. Parvana only goes out to help her father walk to the market, since he lost the lower part of his leg when the school he taught at was bombed. For the past year, Parvana and her siblings have been stuck inside one room. This means that Parvana and her older sister Nooria cannot attend school, and their mother must stop her work as a radio journalist. The Taliban-a fundamentalist Muslim movement whose militia took control of much of Afghanistan from early 1995, and in 1996 took Kabul, the capital, and set up a radical Islamic state-has ordered all girls and women to stay home. She doesn’t say the words loud enough for her father’s customer to hear her because she is not supposed to be outside. Eleven-year-old Parvana, the novel’s protagonist, whispers into her chador headscarf that covers most of her face that she can read as well as her father, who is reading a letter for an illiterate man. Narrated from a third-person omniscient perspective, The Breadwinneropens with a scene in Kabul Market, Afghanistan.
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