May.31.2018.
Starred review in Quill and Quire for Homes: A Refugee Story
Quill and Quire reviews Homes: A Refugee Story by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah & Winnie Yeung alongside Tina Kurdi’s The Boy on the Beach, giving both starred reviews. Reviewer Sheniz Janmohamed writes that “Both Homes and The Boy on the Beach humanize a conflict that too often been condensed to numbers, statistics, and nameless victims. The western gaze reduces Syria to an abstraction of civil war, hunger, violence, and conflicting political and religious factions. But these books force the reader to face the complexities of place. In addition to war and suffering, Syria is also a home, a locus of family and memory. . . . These eloquent, nuanced, and heartbreaking books — filled with life in the face of death — deserve to be read with all the compassion and courage it must have taken to write them.”