Veronica Gao

Reading “Refugee” by Alan Gratz was like eating day-old, lukewarm oatmeal with a few sprinkles on top to try and make it taste better. Honestly, with the extra large font, 3rd grade level storytelling and vocab, and cookie cutter protagonists, this was like reading Junie B. Jones with a few tidbits of poorly edited history thrown in. While I respect the author in trying to inform and educate people about what child refugees go through around the world, it seems too dramatized to truly inform or be entertaining. The book is vaguely based upon true historical events, but the author used artistic license and changed the order of real history so much that every single thing was blown out of proportions. As I was reading, I couldn’t tell whether the author was trying to give a textbook example of what Isabel, Mahmoud, and Josef were going through or to write an actual novel with an actual plot. The dialogue is choppy and characters are given the most cliché character development. It was nearly impossible to decipher any meaning about any event happening in the book besides the overused character arcs that the protagonists went through. Side characters have zero development, zero personality, and seem to serve no purpose. Mahmoud’s father’s only dialogue was either cracking half-witted jokes every couple pages in order to seem like a “funny dad” who cracks “funny dad jokes” or to dramatically say they had to journey to a new place immediately. While I would’ve loved to read this book to learn more about human geography and refugees, I couldn’t tell you a single thing I learned about real history from this book. Every single event that happened in the book was remixed into being ten times more dramatic than it needed to be. The plot was rushed and chapters were short only so the author could end each one on a lame cliffhanger to try and get people to actually want to finish the book.