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It's summer vacation which means that most of the Secondary ELA groups I am in on social media are full of teachers asking for recommendations for books to add to their curricula. I am a big believer in the power of books to change hearts and minds, so my suggestions lean toward YA literature that is high interest, but also deals with timely issues.

We have been fortunate in my district, to be able to provide visiting authors for our 8th and 11th-grade students for the past number of years. This past year the 11th graders read How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child by Sandra Uwiringiyimana with a visit from the author. The 8th graders (my students) read by Alan Gratz and welcomed the author to our school. Refugee is definitely my suggestion for anyone looking to add a fresh novel to their ELA curriculum.

Refugee is both historical and contemporary realistic fiction. Gratz alternates between three stories of refugee children: Josef, a 1933 Jewish refugee fleeing Germany with his family to Cuba; Isabel, a 1994 Cuban refugee fleeing with her family to Miami; and Mahmoud, a present-day Syrian refugee fleeing with this family to Germany. Even though their stories seem disconnected (the reader finds out they are, in fact, all intertwined by the end), parallels in the world's current and past refugee crises is evident. The chapters are short, and tend to end on cliff-hangers, leaving students wanting "just one more." Based on student interest alone, this is a home-run of a novel.

Reading great novels is actually our way to teach our students reading strategies, writing strategies, vocabulary, and grammar. Refugee is a rich text for doing all four of these basic ELA standards.

Because of the unique structure of the novel-rotating between three main characters-keeping the stories straight lends itself to creating timelines for each journey. My students would fill out a Book, Head, Heart framework (from Beers and Probst's 2017 book, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters) for a character of choice. The "Book" column is a basic summary. Using what they wrote in this column, students would research visual representations of what was happening in the story. For example, students found old photos online of the S.S. St. Louis that Josef's character and his family sailed aboard for Cuba from Germany; they found photos of the Cuban refugee crisis of 1994 that Isabel and her family were thrown into; and they printed maps of the devastation happening in Aleppo, Syria now that Mahmoud's family would witness. We kept a classroom visual timeline of each character's journey, and students could use it to retell portions of what happened to people who were absent, or when we were practicing summarizing sections.

The "Head" column of the Book, Head, Heart framework provided students a space to make predictions, talk about their feelings, and jot questions. As a class, we kept a Refugee "parking lot" for questions we had that we wanted to come back to somehow via more research or maybe later in the book. Because of this, many students took it upon themselves to look up new vocabulary, search for more information on historical events, and look up current policies on refugees and immigration. This sparked excellent small group and whole class discussions and allowed me to bring in a variety of informational and argumentative texts on issues of refugees and causes/effects of immigration.

My students stretched their creative writing muscles by examining what they wrote for the "Heart" column of the framework. This column asks students to think about how they are changed, what they will do differently, or how they will think differently because of the story. We used these notes as a starting point for writing some poetry.

First, we did some Blackout Poetry. I found some old books in our Media Center's "free or recycle" bin and ripped the pages out. Each student used their page to find words that they felt represented the character they chose. Then they literally blacked out the rest of the words on the page to form a poem. See below.

Our final project for the book, besides having Alan Gratz visit our school and give a presentation to the entire 8th-grade class, was to write a Persona Poem for a character in the book. I did not restrict them to just the main character but opened it up to any character of their choosing. We workshopped the poems first by filling out a questionnaire as if we were the character we chose. It asked students to make many inferences about how their chosen character would answer. Then we learned about poetic devices. Students were required to use at least two. I wrote alongside my students creating a Persona Poem for a character from a different whole class novel ( The Giver) to avoid them duplicating my ideas and words.

Here is the example I wrote from the point of view of Jonas from The Giver:

For student examples from Refugee, please click here.

Whole class novels should be chosen carefully not just for content that is high interest and can offer valuable lessons to students, but also for its ability to mentor students to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the standards. It is my experience that the novel Refugee by Alan Gratz does both of these.

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Teaching Immigration Empathy: Why Refugee by Alan Gratz Should Be Added To Your Curriculum

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It's summer vacation which means that most of the Secondary ELA groups I am in on social media are full of teachers asking for recommendations for books to add to their curricula.

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User Reviews

when i read this book with my kid we started to see bad words repeatedly hell hell hell over and over again i like it but i wish it did not have hell in it

This is a great book that raises many of questions for discussion. We are using it for our Grade 8 class. It has good historical detail and is based on the sto... Continue reading

Refugee by Alan Gratz will remain as a classic for the coming generations. The book has a historical background. It fuses 3 different stories of 3 different fam... Continue reading

This is a phenomenal book that my whole family enjoyed very much, I also read this at school in L.A. as a whole class and they all had a great time reading it a... Continue reading

What's the story?

REFUGEE braids three different stories of young refugees. In one, Josef and his Jewish family flee Nazi Berlin in 1938. They board the ship St. Louis, based on the actual ship that brought Jewish refugees to Cuba and then to the United States but was denied entry by both. That ship had to return the refugees to Europe, where they were split among four countries, and when those countries subsequently fell to the Nazis, many of the refugees were killed. In another story, Isabel and her family leave Cuba in 1994 on a homemade boat and head for Miami. They weather storms, fight off sharks, and have to deliver a baby onboard. In the third story, Mahmoud and his family flee their Syrian homeland in 2015 when their building in Aleppo is destroyed by the constant shelling. They make their way to Turkey, then by boat to Greece, and overland to Germany. They almost drown, and are preyed upon by mercenaries who exploit their vulnerability. All three journeys are difficult, and the protagonists have to deal with many setbacks and hurdles.

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Skip to Content We're committed to diversity in media. We're updating our reviews to better highlight authentic stories and accurate, diverse representations. See something that needs to be addressed? Suggest an update to this review The parents' guide to what's in this book.

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Best friends Frank and Stanley have it good, daydreaming about the comics they'll create together in beautiful Hawaii, where the air smells like pineapples, the clear blue water sparkles in the sun, and dozens of US battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers stand silent sentinel in the harbor. World War II is raging elsewhere, but not here-not until the morning of December 7, 1941, when Japanese planes suddenly attack without warning. If Frank and Stanley make it through this infamous day, can their friendship-and their dreams-survive? Or has everything they know and love been destroyed?

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Alan Gratz is the author of the New York Times bestseller Refugee and many more books for young readers.