With exact and accessible language - as well as many evocative metaphors, as Kek tries to acclimate to his new life (“we stop at a light/ hung high in the air,/ red and round/ like a baby sun”) - Applegate gives young readers a compelling account of life as an outsider in America. In an immediate, first-person voice, we get a detailed, emotional glimpse into Kek’s adjustment to America and its ways. The popularity of free verse and its constant abuse could be an altogether different post, but I think this one mostly works. After time at a refugee camp, he is reunited with his aunt and cousin, Ganwar, already living in America as refugees, and befriends a cow at a nearby farm, which reminds him of home (“You can have your dogs and cats,/ your gerbils and hamsters/ and sleek sparkling fish./ But you will have lived/ just half a life/ if you never love a cow”). In Home of the Brave ( Feiwel & Friends August 2007 review copy), Katherine Applegate’s first stand-alone literary novel, she tells the story of Kek, who once lived in Africa with his mother, father, and brother but lost the latter two in the midst of war in Sudan. What happens when the creator of the Animorphs series tackles a free verse novel? Well, something quite lovely after all.
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