Unabridged Highlights: Global Read Aloud Books

Quick Summary: In this episode, we discussed three of the choices for Global Read Aloud this year. If you're unfamiliar with Global Read Aloud, it is a movement focused on connecting classrooms around the world through shared reading experiences. Below are the summaries we wrote for each of the novels we discuss in the podcast.

• Samira Ahmed's Love, Hate and Other Filters: Maya Aziz is an aspiring filmmaker, a senior in high school who is balancing determining her own future with pleasing her traditional Indian immigrant parents.  This novel addresses her crush on a white classmate, Phil; her potential relationship with Kareem, a boy from her own Muslim culture; and the prejudice that follows an act of terrorism that has a huge impact on Maya’s (and her parents’) consideration of her identity.
  
  
• Aisha Saeed's Amal Unbound: Amal is a twelve-year-old girl in a small village in Pakistan. As the oldest sibling with a new baby on the way, she has many responsibilities to her family. As those pressures build and her time in school, a place of refuge for her, decreases, she feels increasingly distraught. A momentary loss of composure in the village marketplace causes a major shift in her life circumstances, forcing her into a life of indentured servitude for the local landlord who oversees the village. As her world spirals out of control, she has to struggle to decide who she will be and how she will move forward.
  
  
• Alan Gratz's Refugee: This story examines the lives of three different refugees coming from different time periods and circumstances-- Josef is a Jewish boy fleeing from Nazi Germany, Isabel is a Cuban girl fleeing the Castro regime in 1994, and Mahmoud is a Syrian boy escaping war-torn Aleppo in 2015. Refugee is the story of the journey each of these young people take with their families in search of refuge from political persecution in their own countries.

My Take: While I enjoyed aspects of all three of these novels, I loved Refugee  the most. I found all three of the story lines totally captivating, and I love a book with multiple narrators. What I most appreciated is the way that Gratz uses the different storylines to break down some misconceptions and negative attitudes that people seem to have toward refugees. I also loved Amal Unbound and so appreciated the insight Ahmed gave into life in a Pakistani village. I appreciated the way Ahmed revealed the complex cultural dynamics that lead toward girls being uneducated and the way she highlighted the brave steps girls around Pakistan are taking to change the culture and their larger world.
My conclusions: 

• Love, Hate and Other Filters - 3 out of 5 stars
• Amal Unbound - 5 out of 5 stars
• Refugee - 5 out of 5 stars

Teaching Tips: All three of these novels would work well in the classroom. Love, Hate, and Other Filters would be a great lit circle book and could be taught with other books about hate crimes, terrorism, or second generation experiences. Amal Unbound is a quick, powerful read and could definitely be read whole class as it is fascinating and moves quickly. We're planning to teach Refugee  whole class with our tenth grade students. However, having done some read aloud with them so far this year, we've realized that Refugee  is likely going to be too much to get through with read aloud alone. We're planning to get enough copies for the students so that we can read parts aloud but then let them read by themselves in between the sections we'll read together. 
Podcast Highlights: It was so fun to discuss all three of these books with Jen and Sara, and I loved hearing their perspectives. ​