Summary

There are millions of children around the world engaged in child labor, sometimes forcibly. The novel takes place in Pakistan where carpet making is frequently done by children and some of them are even “chained to their looms“ (vi). Iqbal Masih is a real person, but this book is a fictionalization of his life told by the young Fatima.

A quote at the beginning of Chapter 1 refers to how Iqbal made the narrator feel like she was not invisible. Fatima, the narrator, lives and works with children in the household of Hussein Kahn. Hussein has a large house, and the kids who work do so to pay off debts for their families, working from dawn until after dusk. Dreams are important to Fatima’s people as they believe dreams come from “an unknown area of heaven,“ but the children here have stopped...