From School Library Journal
Grade 5-9?Poignant first-person narratives of three young refugees form the heart of this book. In each case, their travels took them from their homelands in Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya where they were interviewed. Each account is preceded by a couple of pages about the past and present of the narrator's country and a colorful map of the child's journey. The book opens, after a foreword about young refugees, with an explanation of how the author encouraged the camp children to paint and tell their folktales in order to help them talk about their experiences. Then, there is a summary of the worldwide refugee crisis. At the end are pages on Rwanda, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and Save the Children. Unfortunately, some of this material is too difficult for the intended audience and makes the book unfocused. The illustrations are exceptional. Effective photographs and full-color reproductions of the children's paintings, and in many cases their comments about them, are interspersed throughout the book. Because of its shape and the childish appearance of the unsophisticated art, middle-grade readers may be reluctant to pick this title off the shelves. But with a booktalk or other introduction, they are likely to respond to the immediacy of what the children say and paint.?Loretta Kreider Andrews, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, MD
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.