The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Beast

Drawing on traditional Arab and African stories, this book tells a magical, modern folktale about a boy who runs away from home as he struggles to deal with difficult emotions.

"The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Beast" tells the tale of a boy who lives in a bright, colorful village in the clouds. After seeing his grandmother become terminally ill, the boy becomes upset and decides he would prefer to live like a wild beast that doesn't feel any big emotions. He runs away from home and leaps from the edge of a cloud to the world below. There, he finds a land that is dark and gray, completely different than the colorful clouds in which he grew up. Setting out on his quest, each person and creature he meets teaches him something about himself and how to come to terms with loss.

Hossam Abouzahr has over fifteen years of experience working in international development, human rights, writing, and editing. His true passion lies in stories; art; and languages, especially Arabic. By some miraculous twist of fate, he found a way to combine all of them by writing and illustrating his own stories, which he then translates into different Arabic dialects. His writing draws extensively on his personal research on the Arabic language; folklore; literature; and the difficulty in passing those subjects on to children, an experience he knows both from his childhood and now as a father. You can support his madness on Patreon at www.patreon.com/livingarabic. You can also check out his nerdy Arabic website, which has the largest collection of cross-referencing Arabic dialect dictionaries, at www.livingarabic.com. If you want to read about Hossam's experience teaching Arabic to his son, you can check out this article he published in Newlines Magazine: https://newlinesmag.com/argument/how-arabs-have-failed-their-language.