Refugee Literary Elements

Young Adult; Historical Fiction

The novel takes place in Germany and Cuba in 1938–1940, Cuba and Miami in 1994, and Syria and various European countries in 2015. In each storyline, war, prejudice, and political conflicts displace refugees who seek safety outside their home countries.

The book is narrated by an unnamed third-person limited-omniscient narrator. The point of view switches between three protagonists: Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud.

The tone is contemplative and matter-of-fact; the mood shifts between hope and despair, and anxiety and relief.

The protagonists of the three separate storylines are Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud. The primary antagonists for each character are, respectively, Schiendick, Lito, and Europeans with prejudices against Syrian refugees.

The major conflict in Josef's storyline is that he wants to keep his family safe from the Nazis but doesn't know how to escape their influence. In Isabel's story, the major conflict is that she must take action in moments of hesitation and disagreement among her elders if she hopes to reach Florida. For Mahmoud, the major conflict is that he wants to stay invisible to avoid being noticed, but he must get people's attention if he wants the world to support Syrian refugees' resettlement.

The Josef storyline reaches its climax when Nazi soldiers make Rachel choose which of her two children will be given freedom and Josef volunteers to go to a concentration camp in Ruthie's place. The Isabel storyline reaches its climax when Lito jumps ship to distract the US Coast Guard, enabling Isabel and the others to paddle to the Miami shore and achieve refugee status. The Mahmoud storyline reaches its climax when Mahmoud leads a procession of refugees from a guarded camp in Hungary to the unguarded Austrian border.

The entire book is structured around a parallelism between the three protagonists, and more generally between their stories as refugees.

When Mahmoud and his family are left to swim the rest of the way to Greece after their boat capsizes, Gratz personifies the ocean: "If it wanted to, the ocean could open its mouth and swallow him and no one in the whole wide world would ever know he was gone."