Ron Jacobs

Football, Twelve-Year-Old Boys, and Military Curfews: Elizabeth Laird's "A Little Piece of Ground"



Most twelve-year-old boys in the United States spend their days thinking about video games, sports, school work, and maybe that cute girl in homeroom. If their father is a store owner, chances are they have no other concerns, since money is not a problem. In Elizabeth Laird’s novel A Little Piece of Ground (Haymarket Books, 2006), the twelve-year-old boys that serve as the story’s protagonists also spend a lot of their time on the aforementioned concerns. However, they also live in Palestine under occupation.