A Fairy Tale for Children and Adults

          The book "The Black Pearl", which has been recently published in Akko, is written by a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Shushana Yusufov. It is a fantasy novel.  The young writer, undoubtedly possessing rich imagination, brings her main character, an ordinary girl into fantastic kingdom of Algenda. There she is involved in different incredible adventures.  Some readers might say that they are familiar with many fantasy novels and all of them are similar.  The author of this novel has certainly read lots of adventure books affecting her imagination but, nevertheless, she succeeded in creating her own fantastic plot.  She managed to show how personality of the main hero of this book Daniel develops under extremely different circumstances. The book's author exposes her main heroes to all kinds of dangers and trails, and they courageously endure all of them. And in these fantastic circumstances real human feelings and qualities like love, mutual aid, understanding and friendship have been tested and strengthened. Not only impressions made by the novels the author had once read move the plot of Shushana's story. The girl, who wrote this book, lives in a very complicated world. In spite of her young age and not very big life experience, she knows what the wars and terrorist attacks mean.  She was dazed by the events of September 11, 2001 in Manhattan where her relatives live. And this event is reflected in the book:

"Her eyes were full of fear. The drops of people's blood started dripping from her body. She felt pain in her eyes. Why? Why all this happened? The fear squeezed her heart. "Get up! Get up!" she cried. Tears filled her eyes".

The author describes ruined streets of Manhattan in her hero's dream, and a fairy tale acquires a deep meaning.

"Brothers are enemies. Why? Do they lack anything in this fantastic Kingdom?" ask both the hero of this novel and the author. However, till now adult politicians, philosophers, and different public figures cannot find an answer to this simple question of a girl.

Irene Yavchunovsky