I Am Malala

By Malala Yousafzai (with Christina Lamb)


          I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai (with Christina Lamb) is a truly wonderful and inspiring book. If you read this autobiography, you will realize what great challenges this individual faced and how she managed to overcome these challenges.
          Malala was born in "a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children." This means that there were many gender-based stereotypes that Malala had to fight, even from the moment she was born! And fight she did. When she started to see that girls were being denied the rights to go to school and get an education, she stood up to that discrimination and spoke out to her local community (and eventually even news reporters), telling them how important it is for everybody, regardless of gender, to get a quality education. Unfortunately, a militant group (the Taliban) did not approve of girls attending school, much less people fighting against them for things that they disagreed with, and they turned violent. As one of the people fighting against the Taliban, Malala was affected by this violence in a way that no one should ever be in their entire lives.
          This true story of a young girl fighting for education can show the importance of standing up for a cause that you believe is right, no matter how dire the situation is, and how much one can accomplish if they put their minds to it. I hope that you read the book and find it just as inspiring as I did.