![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sometimes, I found beauty in the elegant simplicity of her words, such as when Jude muses: “America / like every other place in the world / is a place where some people sleep / and some people / other people / dream.” Other times, it was her apt proverbs and metaphors, like when Jude’s cousin calls her lucky, and Jude thinks: “There is an Arabic proverb that says: / Her luck splits open rocks. Jasmine Warga’s prose in Other Words for Home is absolutely gorgeous and captivated me from the start. In America, Jude struggles with being separated from her family, Islamophobia, and her new label of “Middle Eastern,” but she also finds pockets of joy, from trying out for the school play to connecting with new family members. But when the situation in her hometown starts to become precarious, Jude and her pregnant mother head to Cincinnati, Ohio, to live with Jude’s uncle, leaving Issa and her father behind. ![]() Jude lives in a city on the sea in Syria, where she dreams about being a movie star and sings Whitney Houston power ballads with her older brother, Issa. Told as a prose poem, the book is full of beautiful and powerful language, and readers will find themselves immediately immersed in the life of a young Syrian girl named Jude. Jasmine Warga’s Other Words for Home was recently named a Younger Readers Category Honor Book in the 2020 Walter Dean Myers Awards for Outstanding Children’s Literature. ![]()
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