I Am Change

This is a very powerful story.

While it is fiction, it is entirely based in reality - on interviews with a young girl from Uganda who reread Zail’s manuscript and checked for inaccuracies and added words, songs and ideas and the characters are based on people in her life.

Lilian has learned to shrink herself to fit other people’s ideas of what a girl is. In Lilian’s village in Uganda a girl is not meant to be smarter than her brother. A girl is not meant to go to school or enjoy her body or decide who to marry.

This makes the story and the pain so much more moving and makes the foreword more poignant to reread after finishing the book.