The Girl at the Window

The Girl at the Window is the coming of age story of a young girl and her quest to find out who she really is. Leah Manoug lives with her mother in a flat in the suburbs of Paris; the whereabouts of her father are shrouded in mystery. Growing up in France in the nineteen eighties, Leah soon learns to fend for herself from an early age. She tries to come to grips with her ethnicity, nationality, parentage and racism. When she accidentally finds out the identity of her estranged father, she is shaken to the core and questions her own identity. She falls into a self-loathing spiral, which will only be broken when she moves to England. The Girl at the Window raises contemporary issues such as the breakdown of the family unit, the stigma of interracial parenting, and some of the issues faced by second generation immigrants in terms of belonging. All these issues relate to the broader themes of identity and the acceptance of oneself.