Saadia Faruqi

With her eighth birthday coming up, Marya claims she is having an epic henna party, so now she must convince her family to make it happen and work to pull it off, but everything Marya does seems to end in disaster.

When Marya's third-grade class participates in taking care of the school's new garden, Marya wants to be the student leader in charge, but every time she tries to prove she has what it takes to be a leader things get messy.

"When her grandmother comes off the airplane in Houston from Pakistan, Mahnoor knows that having Dadi move in is going to disrupt everything about her life. She doesn't have time to be Dadi's unofficial babysitter: her journalism teacher has announced that their big assignment will be to film a documentary, which feels more like storytelling than what Maha would call 'journalism.' As Dadi starts to settle into life in Houston and Maha scrambles for...

Yasmin and her friend Emma are going to the ice rink, but Yasmin is nervous and does not want to admit that she has never skated, so she delays going on the ice as long as possible--but when she falls down Emma's mother offers to teach her, and Emma helps.

Second grader Ali Tahir considers himself to be a dinosaur expert, but on a class field trip to the natural history museum, Ali keeps getting his facts wrong, and is embarrassed in front of his friends and classmates.

Unsure about her artistic skills, second-grader Yasmin is not looking forward to the art competition at school--but with the support and encouragement of her family she produces a prize-winning painting.

"Marya loves fall. Every year, her family goes to the town's fall festival and picks out the best pumpkin. But this year, after she sees her frenemy Alexa winning a big, cool pumpkin-shaped trophy, Marya knows she's got to win a trophy for something. It just so happens that her school is going to hold its own fall festival, with games and food and even a hayride. All the ticket sales will go to an animal shelter, and the person who sells the most...

When a new gym teacher introduces her gym class to soccer, Yasmin fears it will be as rough as the professional sport but must try to find courage to play goalie.

Yasmin struggles with Ms. Alex's assignment to write an essay about her hero until she realizes that her hero is someone very close to her.

Everyone seems to have an idea for the science fair except for Yasmin, but after some failed experiments Yasmin's snack break with Nani inspires an idea.