MUZOON

Driven from her homeland by civil war, a Syrian refugee describes her experiences and delivers a pointed message.

Effectively recapturing a child’s perspective, Almellehan recalls her safe world of street soccer, close family ties, and olive harvests as a 12-year-old in 2010 that is gradually overshadowed by news of violent events and, at last, transformed by a 2013 move to a refugee camp in Jordan—a planned 10-day sojourn that turns to months, then years and further moves, until at last she and her family wind up in Newcastle, England, far from everything familiar. What gets her through many hardships is a strong, stubborn dedication to the importance of education, particularly for girls. She not only keeps up her own classwork and starts working with UNICEF to persuade others in the rough refugee camps to stay in school, but later battles her way through the British educational system in the face of low expectations. Meanwhile, she becomes, particularly after meeting and bonding with Malala Yousafzai, an advocate for education with an international reputation. She opens with a reminder that “a refugee is not a type of person” but “someone in a kind of situation that could happen to anyone,” closes on her first day of university, and in between challenges readers to pay attention to her story: “I don’t want people to know about refugees,” she tells an interviewer. “I want them to listen to refugees.”

One compelling story amid millions, delivered in a strong, steadfast voice.