Ocean State Libraries

Zulaikha, a thirteen-year-old girl in Afghanistan, faces a series of frightening but exhilirating changes in her life as she defies her father and secretly meets with an old woman who teaches her to read, her older sister gets married, and American troops offer her surgery to fix her disfiguring cleft lip.

Liam is an Ojibwa boy starting at a new school, and he is self conscious because of his cleft lip--especially after another boy tells him that he looks like a lion.