Tuesday, May 14, 2019

The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees by Don Brown

genre: graphic nonfiction

What Don Brown has done in this book is tell the stories of countless Syrian refugees through telling the stories of a few.  The illustrations are stetchy and non-specific in the sense that we are not supposed to be following along and recognizing specific people - that's not the point.  The point is to tell the general story of how people could be living a perfectly fine life in Syria to a few years later be living in a refugee camp, or be killed trying to flee in a tiny raft or be resettled in another country.  It outlines historical context and give a broad sense of how the world handled this huge problem. 

It made me teary, more than once.  It made me THINK and HURT and it also made me think about how strange it is to imagine such recent history this way - to see this diaspora right before our eyes, to have lived through watching it on the news and then see it laid out, the shame and horror of it.  The illustrations aren't unduly graphic at all and while I read this quickly, I think it will be on my mind for a while to come.

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