By Jasmine Warga
A Syrian girl sent to safety in America carries her old home inside her while she learns to make a new one.
Jude loves her seaside town in Syria, her movie-star daydreams, her best friend, and most of all her big brother Issa. But the country grows dangerous, Issa is pulled toward the protests, and to keep Jude and her pregnant mother out of harm, the family sends the two of them to Cincinnati to live with relatives, an aunt, uncle, and cousin, while Jude's father and Issa stay behind. In America Jude lands in an ESL class where English comes slowly, and once she begins to wear a hijab, some strangers eye her with suspicion. She and her mother wait on news from home with a baby on the way, and Jude tries out for a part in the school play. The story is told in short, plain-spoken poems, one small moment at a time.
This is the gentler, more hopeful companion to the harder refugee stories, which is why it sits mid-trail rather than at the top. The danger in Syria stays mostly off the page, and the American half is really about the everyday courage of being new, so a child feels the weight of what Jude left without being frightened by it. The verse is spare and warm, and Jude is such good company that the homesickness and the low-grade suspicion she meets never turn the book bleak. It won a Newbery Honor, and it lets a child sit inside the experience of a Muslim immigrant girl and simply like her.