Boy Overboard

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, and gender discrimination.

The story’s main protagonist and first-person narrator is 11-year-old Jamal. At the start of the novel, he lives with his parents and younger sister in an unnamed town in Afghanistan. The desert surrounding his town is more or less a warzone, littered with burned-out tanks and minefields and subject to sporadic bombings and skirmishes by Taliban fighters and other factions. A member of a minority ethnic group, Jamal is also painfully aware of his outsider status in his own homeland. Like other children in his town, he seeks haven from the stresses of his precarious life in sports fandom, particularly football (soccer), which he watches on a neighbor’s illegal satellite TV hookup and plays with his friends in the desert near his home. Jamal has a special fondness for UK teams, such as Manchester United and its star player David Beckham, who, at the time of the novel’s action (the early 2000s), was one of the most famous soccer players in the world.

Having lived in a warzone for most of his life, Jamal has acclimatized himself to many of its dangers: He knows, while chasing soccer balls, to avoid the minefields and defines a “good” day as one with no gas or bomb attacks, which, he notes, can “really put you off your football skills” (1).