Shamini Flint. Ten. Allen & Unwin, May 2015. 132 pp., $12.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781760112264
Maya lives in a small seaside village in Malaysia. She dreams of becoming a soccer star, even though, at first she doesn’t even have a ball! Gradually she manages to influence some other girls to join her and soccer (or, as Maya insists, football) becomes suddenly popular when the daughter of the most important man in town decides to play. A competition is established between some of the girls’ schools in the area and Maya’s school wins. Even more exciting for her, however, is that she wins a trip to England to see a friendly between Brazil (her favourite team) and England.
The book is told in first-person narrative so we see things from Maya’s point-of-view. Although she loves her football, not all is going well in her life. Her parents argue constantly and eventually separate, with her father returning to England. This leads to the climactic scene in the book in which Maya carries out a daring action which she hopes will bring her father back.
As this indicates, there is more to this story than football. There is the issue of family break-up and there are underlying issues of race too, as Maya’s father is English and her grandmother worries about whether anyone will want to marry a girl who is ‘half-white’. This is exacerbated by the grandmother’s ‘shame’, as she calls it, that her daughter can’t even hold on to a husband who prefers to return to England. Maya’s brother doesn’t want to eat Indian food and prefers to eat Western food, much to his mother’s distress.
The only other Tamil girl in the school Maya attends is isolated and bullied, even by the teachers. Maya wishes she could do something about this but is afraid to try as she does not want to become isolated herself. She feels guilty about this and eventually does do something about it.
After realising that their father isn’t going to come back, Maya and her brother learn to adjust and to find ways of coping, a situation not uncommon in families today. In addition, there are issues of gender, as at first Maya is confronted with the argument that girls don’t play soccer. Rajiv, who is only fourteen, believes he needs to become the ‘man of the house’ when his father leaves. This is despite the fact that it has been made clear to the reader that the children’s father is actually less competent than their mother.
The book was originally published in Singapore but the story – and its messages – has a universality and appeal, particularly at a time when women’s soccer is becoming increasingly popular.
reviewed by Margot Hillel