By Alan Gratz
Three children, three different escapes across eighty years, all running from home to somewhere safe, braided together into one page-turner about what it means to be a refugee.
Three children, three different centuries of danger. Josef is a Jewish boy in 1938 Berlin, put on a ship of refugees sailing away from the Nazis, hoping some country will let his family in. Isabel is a Cuban girl in 1994, climbing onto a homemade raft with her family to cross the shark-water to Florida. Mahmoud is a Syrian boy in 2015, walking out of a bombed-out Aleppo with his family, heading for Europe on foot and by leaking boat. Alan Gratz cuts between the three in short, cliff-hanging chapters, and slowly the eighty years between them start to rhyme. It moves like a thriller and it will not let a child put it down.
For a grades 6-8 room, this is the book that makes history urgent. The short chapters and the constant cut between three escapes give it the pull of an action movie, so children who think they don't like historical fiction get swept along before they notice they're learning. And because the three stories span 1938, 1994, and 2015, it quietly says that a refugee is a refugee in any decade, which turns the news a child half-hears at home into three faces they now care about. It reads aloud beautifully and it starts real conversation.