The Good Sister

Author/Guide: Morgan Jones

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: You go somewhere to find yourself but what happens if you ending up losing yourself?

ISBN: 978-1509832491
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

If you had the chance to escape from your life and, better still, fight for a cause you believe in, would you take it? At seventeen, disenfranchized with her life in London, with a mother too sick to care for her and a father too broken to, Sofia Mounir packs her bags and heads to the only place that makes sense: Raqqa. A place where she can be part of something greater than herself. Where she can help build a new society from the ground up. But what happens when that world isn’t everything you dreamed of? When you realize that other people’s intentions might not be as pure as your own? And what happens when you’re not allowed to leave alive?

Travel Guide

Gaziantep Turkey and Raqqa Syria

A story into the unknown

A girl heads off to Syria to live with her new brothers and sisters in the fight against the infidel. Raqqa is the heart of this calliphate and it’s here that the foundations of a new world and a new life are being built. It will take sacrifice and violence to get to the stage they want and deserve, but the fight will be worth it. Something beautiful will come from it and she will be part of that. What better place to be than in London, where your life is going nowhere and you feel abandoned and alone.

Raqqa is the heartland of ISIS

“You could ever leave ISIS, you could as easily tear u a contract with the devil”

Gaziantep

Akcale two hours south east of this town is the gateway to the khalifa. It’s “popular for a town no one wanted to go to. Abraham travels here on his way to rescue his daughter.

How to find someone here:

“Every girl in Gaziantep, the facd was here and now hers. It was a sort of blindness, Half of them ore headscarves, of course, as she had, so that any woman of her height was a candidate, and Abraham began to grow feverish with hope and swift disappointment. It was crazy anyway, to think he would see her in this city of a million.”

Booktrailer Review

Susan: @thebooktrailer

A fascinating and heartbreaking novel at the same time. Very apt for today too as there have been many stories on the news of young girls and indeed boys who head out to Syria to fight for the ISIS cause. They are British born and are from various backgrounds, brought up with Western ways but still, for some reason or another, fall back on what ISIS, their peers, sometimes religious leaders tell them is happening in their homeland and that they have a duty – a Muslim duty – to fight against the non-believer and fight for the cause.

But as if often the case, these groups have a good way of setting up the cause as if it’s the answer to everything and then, once the person gets to Syria, the reality is quite different. This book looks at that, the reasons why someone from the UK would ever think of going, how they would go and what they would do when there. Might be very different from the world you and I am from, but that sense of growing up, alone, afraid and disenchanted – not too dissimilar. It was interesting to follow this girl on her journey.

What I really felt the novel did well was to concentrate on the father, that poor man who couldn’t understand why his daughter went out there. His character, religious beliefs and role as a father was heartbreaking to read about and I’ve always wondered how the parents feel when something like this happen. They’re often the last to know and it was a gripping read to be so close to someone going through that.

Snippets of the communication on line this girl has had with those in Syria or the ‘recruiters’ was effective – easy to see why this girl got sucked in so quickly. I found I got a really interesting insight into this true to life tale and it was nicely written and heartbreakingly realistic.

This is happening to so many people everyday. fighting at night and a country being destroyed every day. People and children getting killed everyday. Children running off to fight for something they don’t understand. Parents and families getting left behind. Lives destroyed. That’s the shocking tragedy of this book.