The story of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, a young boy whose family moved from Iraq to Syria just before the start of the Syrian civil war. In 2014 his family finally found safety in immigrating to Edmonton, Canada.
In 2010, the al Rabeeah family left their home in Iraq in hope of a safer life. They moved to Homs, in Syria - just before the Syrian civil war broke out.
Abu Bakr, one of eight children, was ten years old when the violence began on the streets around him: car bombings, attacks on his mosque and school, firebombs late at night. Homes tells of the strange juxtapositions of growing up in a war zone: horrific, unimaginable events punctuated by normalcy - soccer, cousins, video games, friends.
Homes is the remarkable true story of how a young boy emerged from a war zone - and found safety in Canada - with a passion for sharing his story and telling the world what is truly happening in Syria. As told to her by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, writer Winnie Yeung has crafted a heartbreaking, hopeful, and urgently necessary book that provides a window into understanding Syria.
“Both Homes and The Boy on the Beach humanize a conflict that has too often been condensed to numbers, statistics, and nameless victims . . . These eloquent, nuanced, and heartbreaking books ? filled with life in the face of death ? deserve to be read with all the compassion and courage it must have taken to write them." ? Quill and Quire starred review "From a safe distance, the violence of the Syrian civil war is too vast and grotesque to grasp. How does one comprehend the deaths of 500,000 people, after all? Homes grants readers an intimate view of the war through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy as he struggles to play, pray, and survive as his world collapses around him. Homes stands as one of those rare books that manages to find humanity in the inhumane and, in the end, says more about love than war." ? Marcello di Cintio, winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing for Walls: Travels Along the Barricades "This charming and warm-hearted book is a refugee story like no other. A captivating read." ? Deborah Campbell, winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Non-Fiction for A Disappearance in Damascus "Abu Bakr al Rabeeah is brave, his family are brave, and Homes is a compelling, honest chronicle of one harrowing journey across collapsing nation-states. Winnie Yeung does a fine job bringing out the humanity in this ? and by extension, every other ? refugee tale." ? Charles Foran, author of Mordecai: The Life and Times”
"Besides the terrific prose and its more harrowing details, what really makes the 220-page book special is its fully realized portrait of normal, everyday Syria slowly being chipped away at by numerous interests wrestling for power.
One of the book's great strengths is the on-the-streets feeling in Syria - kids playing soccer one moment, avoiding unknown peril sneaking through familiar alleys to avoid dangerous checkpoints the next." - Edmonton Journal
Abu Bakr al Rabeeah is a high school student in Edmonton, Canada.
Winnie Yeung is a teacher who lives in Edmonton with her black pug, Zoe. Homes is her first book.
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