Refugee (Alan Gratz) Summary
Gratz, Alan

Refugee (Alan Gratz) Overview

Alan Gratz’s young adult fiction novel Refugee explores the lives and stories of three young adults: Josef Landau, Isabel Fernandez, and Mahmoud Bishara. Josef is a Jewish boy living in Berlin Germany, 1938. In order to avoid concentration camps, Josef's family plans to escape to Cuba. Isabel is a Cuban girl living in Havana in 1994, and when her father becomes a target of the police, her family decides to escape by boat to the United States. Mahmoud is a Muslim boy in Aleppo, Syria in 2015, and his family has no other choice but to leave Syria when their entire apartment building is destroyed by a missile. Though the three harrowing stories span multiple decades and countries, all three children face a world that treats them as invisible. This novel explores the themes of perseverance, compassion, cultural identity, and hope.