Shahrzad and the Angry King

A rebel dreamer of a girl daydreams about her role in making the world a better place—and since dreams bleed into reality, maybe she really does.A Kirkus Reviews Best Beginning Reader of 2022!Shahrzad and the Angry King is a contemporary reimagining of the Scheherazade tale, starring scooter-riding, story-loving Shahrzad. Shahrzad loves stories and looks for them everywhere. When she meets a boy and asks him to tell her his story, he recounts fleeing a country that was peaceful and happy, until its grieving king grew angry and cruel. Shahrzad can't forget the boy and his story, and so, when she sees a toy airplane in a store, she imagines herself zooming off to the boy's home country, where she confronts the king, to make him reflect on the kind of leader he really wants to be. Like Scheherazade, she tells the king story after story, but this time not to save her own life, but those of the king's people and his own. Because Shahrzad knows the power of the creative imagination and that the stories we tell and the words we use shape our very existence. We live and die by the sword? Not exactly, says Shahrzad. We live or die by the stories we tell and how we see, frame, and word the world. Brought to life by Iranian artist Nahid Kazemi, this bold heroine reminds us of how powerfully intertwined reality is with the stories we tell.

Nahid Kazemi is a visual artist and author-illustrator with a master's degree in painting from the Tehran University of Art. She has published more than sixty children's books and has received awards for her illustrations in Iran, Canada, and China, as well as nominations for the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She has also taught art and has exhibited her work in Iran, France, Italy, the UK, Lebanon, and Serbia. She lives in Montreal.