Nominated for the OLA Forest of Reading Red Maple Award, Yara’s Spring by Jamal Saeed and Sharon E. McKay is a harrowing tale of one family’s journey out of war torn Syria.

Yara’s Spring is an Own Voices story based on Jamal Saeed’s experiences and observations while a political prisoner in Syria during 80s and 90s and during the Arab Spring in 2010. The pacing of this story is so fast, it is so hard to put it down. You don’t want to leave Yara and her family for a second for fear of what will happen as they travel across the country to flee to safety. I love how the authors broke the book up into sections: Life in Aleppo, The Journey, Sanctuary: Mar Musa and Damascus. The sections offer the reader a chance to regroup before moving onto the next obstacle. Reading this story is an eye opening experience. I remember not that long ago, when there were many organizations sponsoring Syrian refugees to come here to Canada. Their journey’s may not have looked exactly like Yara’s but certainly there are echoes of that experience for all refugees who seek safety in places like Canada.

It’s vital that our young readers have access to stories like Yara’s Spring. As Kate DiCamillo said in her 2018 Time article, “I think our job is to trust our readers.” Readers are so much stronger than we give them credit for, especially middle grade readers. These are children who are beginning to question and form their identities apart from their family identity. We need to trust them to read and understand perspectives from all across the world, and hopefully build compassion, understanding, a feeling of being seen and a sense of the experiences that may or may not reflect their own. 

For so many newcomers to Canada, Yara’s Spring will show them that they are not alone in their experience and it will help their classmates and peers better understand the struggles of just getting to a safe haven and reflecting on the privilege of being born and raised in a country not torn apart by war.