Kek will be instantly recognizable to immigrants, but he is also well worth meeting by readers living in homogeneous communities." - School Library Journal
"Readers older than the stated age range would surely enjoy such a beautiful story." - Children's Literature The book highlights the importance of attitude to success, a life lesson worth repeating as well. "This book would make a great read-aloud as well as a discussion starter on the reasons why people choose to immigrate or how they might feel in a strange land. 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 boy's first-person narrative is immediately accessible. A memorable inside view of an outsider." - Publishers Weekly (Sept."Precise, highly accessible language evokes a wide range of emotions and simultaneously tells an initiation story. Precise, highly accessible language evokes a wide range of emotions and simultaneously tells an initiation story. Kek endures a mixture of failures (he uses the clothes washer to clean dishes) and victories (he lands his first paying job), but one thing remains constant: his ardent desire to learn his mother's fate. Prefaced by an African proverb, each section of the book marks a stage in the narrator's assimilation, eloquently conveying how his initial confusion fades as survival skills improve and friendships take root. An onslaught of new sensations greets Kek (“This cold is like claws on my skin,” he laments), and ordinary sights unexpectedly fill him with longing (a lone cow in a field reminds him of his father's herd when he looks in his aunt's face, “I see my mother's eyes/ looking back at me”). The boy has traveled by “flying boat” to Minnesota in winter to live with relatives who fled earlier. After witnessing the murders of his father and brother, then getting separated from his mother in an African camp, Kek alone believes that his mother has somehow survived.
In her first stand-alone book, Applegate (the Animorphs series) effectively uses free verse to capture a Sudanese refugee's impressions of America and his slow adjustment.
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