The Fire Escape’s review is coming soon! by Mitali Perkins Free verse books like this, when done well, make fantastic read-alouds. I read “Home of the Brave” aloud to my spellbound son and then to a group of knitting women because of the evocative imagery and lovable first person voice. One comment to “Review: Katherine Applegate’s Home of the Brave” I think I read it several times before moving on:Īnd, though Ganwar may never acclimate to life as an immigrant (“We don’t belong here, Kek, Ganwar says./ This isn’t our country./ It never will be”), it’s a happy - even if somewhat pat - ending for Kek, who eventually learns the meaning of home and that “finding the sun is one way to be a man.” This one made my heart knock itself around in my chest a little while. As Hazel Rochman put it in her Booklist review, this novel allows young readers to get behind “those news images of streaming refugees far away.” And I must add that the beautiful entry “Mama,” as Kek longs to receive news that his mother is alive, could stand alone as its own poem, separate from the novel. With exact and accessible language - as well as many evocative metaphors, as Kek tries to acclimate to his new life (“we stop at a light/ hung high in the air,/ red and round/ like a baby sun”) - Applegate gives young readers a compelling account of life as an outsider in America. In an immediate, first-person voice, we get a detailed, emotional glimpse into Kek’s adjustment to America and its ways.

The popularity of free verse and its constant abuse could be an altogether different post, but I think this one mostly works. After time at a refugee camp, he is reunited with his aunt and cousin, Ganwar, already living in America as refugees, and befriends a cow at a nearby farm, which reminds him of home (“You can have your dogs and cats,/ your gerbils and hamsters/ and sleek sparkling fish./ But you will have lived/ just half a life/ if you never love a cow”).

In Home of the Brave ( Feiwel & Friends August 2007 review copy), Katherine Applegate’s first stand-alone literary novel, she tells the story of Kek, who once lived in Africa with his mother, father, and brother but lost the latter two in the midst of war in Sudan. What happens when the creator of the Animorphs series tackles a free verse novel? Well, something quite lovely after all.

Kek home of the brave