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.
"Beautiful. Thank you for publishing this book. Thank Katherine Applegate for writing it." --Karen Hesse "Moving . . . Kek is both a representative of all immigrants and a character in his own right." --School Library Journal, Starred Review "Precise, highly accessible language evokes a wide range of emotions and simultaneously tells an initiation story. A memorable inside view of an outsider." --Publishers Weekly "This beautiful story of hope and resilience . . . is an almost lyrical story." --Voice of Youth Advocates "The boy's first-person narrative is immediately accessible. Like Hanna Jansen's Over a Thousand Hills I Walk With You, the focus on one child gets behind those news images of streaming refugees far away." --Booklist "The evocative spareness of the verse narrative will appeal to poetry lovers as well as reluctant readers and ESL students." --The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books ". . . beautifully written in free verse . . . a thought-provoking book about a topic sure to evoke the empathy of readers." --KLIATT
Gr 5-7-American culture, the Minnesota climate, and personal identity are examined in this moving first-person novel written in free verse. Kek comes to the U.S. from war-torn Sudan via a refugee camp. He arrives on a "flying boat" and is mystified by "not dead" trees in winter. Through his fresh eyes, readers see both the beauty and the ugliness of our way of life. The words themselves are simple, but Applegate introduces some hard ideas. How does someone know he has done well at the end of the day if all the familiar benchmarks are suddenly gone? Kek is both a representative of all immigrants and a character in his own right. A creative thinker, a problem-solver, and an optimist despite the horrors that have befallen him, he is a warm and winning protagonist. He bridges his herding culture and our own by finding a cow that needs his care, even in a metropolitan area, and uses ingenuity when threatened with yet more loss on that front. Kek will be instantly recognizable to immigrants, but he is also well worth meeting by readers living in homogeneous communities.-Faith Brautigam, Gail Borden Public Library, Elgin, IL Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
"Beautiful. Thank you for publishing this book. Thank Katherine Applegate for writing it." --Karen Hesse "Moving . . . Kek is both a representative of all immigrants and a character in his own right." --School Library Journal, Starred Review "Precise, highly accessible language evokes a wide range of emotions and simultaneously tells an initiation story. A memorable inside view of an outsider." --Publishers Weekly "This beautiful story of hope and resilience . . . is an almost lyrical story." --Voice of Youth Advocates "The boy's first-person narrative is immediately accessible. Like Hanna Jansen's Over a Thousand Hills I Walk With You, the focus on one child gets behind those news images of streaming refugees far away." --Booklist "The evocative spareness of the verse narrative will appeal to poetry lovers as well as reluctant readers and ESL students." --The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books ". . . beautifully written in free verse . . . a thought-provoking book about a topic sure to evoke the empathy of readers." --KLIATT
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