Book Review- A Pocketful of Stars by Aisha Bushby
A pocketful of stars by Aisha Bushby is an emotion story about Safiya, whose mum falls into a coma after they had an argument. Now Safiya finds herself drifting off into her mother’s past in Kuwait. Safiya and her mother have never seen eye to eye. Her mum doesn’t understand Safiya’s love of gaming and Safiya doesn’t think they have anything in common. As Safiya struggles to fit in she wonders if her mum wants her to be more like her confident best friend Elle.
But then her mum falls into a coma, and when Safiya sits by her bedside she finds herself in a strange alternative world that looks a bit like one of video games. And there’s a rebellious teenage girl with a secret, who looks suspiciously familiar… Safiya has always struggled in school and her mother and her never see eye to eye, so she finds herself pushed to the test when her mom falls into a coma and her best friend is starting to drift away. On top of that she must raise against the past and unlock her mother’s past like one of her video games, except in this one you only get one life.
Safiya is just a teenager who is struggling in school, and divorced parent. She has always visited her mother in her apartment from time to time. Let’s just say Safiya and her mother haven’t always seen eye to eye… After a really heated argument her mother falls into a coma.
Safiya sits by her bedside table hoping for her to recover, when she is transported into an alternate world. She explores her surrounding and after a few visits concludes that she is somehow in her mother’s past. Safiya must play this new world like a video game if she wants to save her mother before it’s too late. But could it really be as state forward as it appears or is there a catch? Why would she be transported into her mother’s past and could this be the key to saving her from this coma or much more than she will realize?!
Back in reality she feels her best friend growing up without her, drifting away from her. She finds new friends who actually like the same things as her like her favorite video games! What decisions will she make and will one end up ruining her entire life?
A Pocketful of Stars by Aisha Bushby is one of the best books I have read. I read this book in one go because it is such an emotionally compelling story of a girl who doesn’t deserve this kind of misery. I have shed a few tears but I will not say when as I would not like to spoil the book for you but it is an amazing book. Aisha Bushby included flashbacks on the way Safiya and her mom felt during and after the fight they had and why they had their fight. When you read the flashbacks, you feel so empathetic towards
Safiya’s situation because that could have been the last conversation she had with her mother and how she feels sorry but she can’t tell her because she might have been gone forever. Aisha Bushby purposefully transports the character of Safiya to her mums past so that she can in a way rediscover her past and see that they might just have some things in common and sees herself in her mother’s point of view having witnessed everything she did as a girl.
“The stars wave hello, like they’ve been expecting me.”
-Safiya
When Safiya does visit her mother’s past she she’s the world from her mother’s imagination. Like her mother had seen or imagined, she sees magic and laughter like her mother witnessed all those years ago. Everyday Safiya discovers objects which she needs to collect to progress to the next part of the story and bring to her mother in her coma; like a video game.
Aisha Bushby was selected as one of only four previously unpublished authors in the Stripes anthology for BAME writers, A Change is Gonna Come, alongside writers such as Patrice Lawrence, Tanya Byrne and Nikesh Shukla. The anthology was awarded a YA Book Prize Special Achievement Award. Since then she has been taking part in panels, interviews and events across the UK, from Bristol Waterstones to Manchester Academy, Birmingham Literature Festival to South bank YAWL, BBC Radio 3 to Buzz feed. A Pocketful of Stars is her debut novel. I have never cried in a book like I did this one so Aisha Bushby has done some amazing work on this novel!
This emotionally compelling story gets 5/5 stars for its amazing story line; A Pocket Full of Stars by Aisha Bushby.