It's an odd experience, reading this book. Of course it is encouraging and horrifying and enraging and all this is pretty much as expected - a story of a child shot in the head for wanting to learn, and her subsequent recovery, can be nothing else. But as affecting as it was watching it on the news at the time, from the other side of the world, safe and educated myself, it was also somewhat distanced. And over the years, it got harder and harder to think of this girl as a person instead of an icon. Icons are easy. We fit our expectations to them in an almost mythic way, as if they exist to fill some hole in the universe with specific purpose, an object lesson instead of a personality. I certainly didn't think of that girl as constantly squabbling with her brother, or desperately wanting to be a sparkly vampire after reading Twilight, or giving her chicken a very ill-fated bath. And I think if this book does nothing else it speaks to the very ordinariness of its subject. I don't mean that as denigration - Malala is clearly brighter and more determined than most - but there's really no difference between an extraordinary girl shot down for learning, and an ordinary girl shot down for the same.

What happened to her isn't terrible because she's an exception. It's terrible because she's not - because there are millions of girls like her being kept from an education and the chance to achieve their potential. Any one of them could have been her. None of them should be.