As strange and faraway a place as Afghanistan may be to most Canadian readers, in Rukhsana Khan’s contemporary story it has a fairy-tale familiarity – of the Grimm sort, not Disney. Like Cinderella, Wanting Mor’s young heroine, Jameela, becomes a slave to her stepmother. Like Hansel and Gretel, she is cast out into a dangerous world by her feckless father.

This is an Afghanistan gripped by war, yet it is also a place of piety and surprising generosity. Khan puts us completely inside the head of her young protagonist. (We don’t know Jameela’s age, and perhaps Jameela herself doesn’t, either.) Her depiction of Jameela’s reactions to terrible events – finding her beloved mother, Mor, dead; being abandoned by her father – at first seems muted, but in the context of war and so much loss, it is probably psychologically accurate.

Jameela must also deal with the disfigurement of a cleft lip. This doesn’t seem to trouble her as much as we might expect, for who will see it? She embraces the porani she winds around her head, and later the chadri that erases her sexuality. She complains very little about life’s unfairness – if she can work and pray, she feels some measure of control. She has a puritanical streak that can make her judgmental, but she is also brave, smart, and resilient.

After Jameela’s father abandons her at the market, the worst does not happen. Instead, she is rescued and taken to an orphanage – for her, a place of near-luxury. When she finds safety and stability – no happy-ever-after, but a chance for a useful future – we stop holding our breath and instead rejoice for her.