Home of the Brave - Hardcover

Applegate, Katherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312367651 ISBN 13: 9780312367657

Publisher: Feiwel & Friends, 2007

Synopsis

Kek comes from Africa. In America he sees snow for the first time, and feels its sting. He's never walked on ice, and he falls. He wonders if the people in this new place will be like the winter – cold and unkind.

In Africa, Kek lived with his mother, father, and brother. But only he and his mother have survived, and now she's missing. Kek is on his own. Slowly, he makes friends: a girl who is in foster care; an old woman who owns a rundown farm, and a cow whose name means "family" in Kek's native language. As Kek awaits word of his mother's fate, he weathers the tough Minnesota winter by finding warmth in his new friendships, strength in his memories, and belief in his new country.

Bestselling author Katherine Applegate presents a beautifully wrought novel about an immigrant's journey from hardship to hope.

Home of the Brave is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

About this title

About the Author

Katherine Applegate is the author of several best-selling young adult series, including Animorphs and Roscoe Riley Rules. Home of the Brave, her first standalone novel, received the SCBWI 2008 Golden Kite Award for Best Fiction and the Bank Street 2008 Josette Frank Award. "In Kek's story, I hope readers will see the neighbor child with a strange accent, the new kid in class from some faraway land, the child in odd clothes who doesn't belong," she says. "I hope they will see themselves." She lives with her family in Irvine, California.

From the Back Cover

When the flying boat
returns to Earth at last,
I open my eyes
and gaze out the round window.
What is all the white? I whisper.
Where is all the world?

From the Inside Flap

Kek comes from Africa.

In America, he sees the snow for the first time, and feels its sting. He's never walked on ice, and he falls. He wonders if the people in this new place will be like the winter―cold and unkind.

In Africa, Kek lived with his mother, father, and brother. But only he and his mother have survived, and now she's missing. Kek is on his own. Slowly, he makes friends: a girl who is in foster care, and old woman who owns a rundown farm, and a cow whose name means "family" in his native language. As Kek awaits word of his mother's fate, he weathers the tough Minnesota winter by finding warmth in his few friendships, strength in his memories, and belief in his new country.

Bestselling author Katherine Applegate presents a beautifully wrought novel about an immigrant's journey from hardship to hope.

Katherine Applegate is the author of several bestselling series, including Animorphs, as well as The Buffalo Storm, a picture book.

Home of the Brave is Katherine Applegate's first stand-alone novel. "In Kek's story, I hope readers will see the neighbor child with a strange accent, the new kid in class from some faraway land, the child in odd clothes who doesn't belong," she says. "I hope they see themselves."

Ms. Applegate lives with her family in North Carolina.

Reviews

Kek, a young Sudanese refugee, is haunted by guilt that he survived. He saw his father and brother killed, and he left his mother behind when he joined his aunt's family in Minnesota. In fast, spare free verse, this debut novel by nonfiction writer Applegate gets across the immigrant child's dislocation and loss as he steps off the plane in the snow. He does make silly mistakes, as when he puts his aunt's dishes in the washing machine. But he gets a job caring for an elderly widow's cow that reminds him of his father's herds, and he helps his cousin, who lost a hand in the fighting. He finds kindness in his fifth-grade ESL class, and also racism, and he is astonished at the diversity. The boy's first-person narrative is immediately accessible. Like Hanna Jansen's Over a Thousand Hills I Walk with You (2006), the focus on one child gets behind those news images of streaming refugees far away. Rochman, Hazel

Edition details

• Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312367651
• ISBN 13: 9780312367657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256