A review by dorothy_gale
When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson, Omar Mohamed
4.0
4.4★: A CHILD’S LIFE INSIDE A KENYAN REFUGEE CAMP. My 10-year-old daughter read this first, and then when I noticed how high its ratings were, I decided to give it a whirl. The artwork certainly did the narrative justice, and there were a couple of open questions that turned the pages quickly for my curiosity. I think it’s beneficial for American children to read these kind of memoirs to help provide global awareness and perspective -- and the “graphic novel” format makes this true story far more accessible. And now that I finished it, my kid and I can have a conversation about it. While the memoir has positive messages of compassion and perseverance, it may serve a limited audience of ages ~9-12 for educational purposes. There is no graphic violence or blood, but there is verbal and physical bullying between children, talk of war and the loss of parents, chronic fear, extreme poverty, a few images of guns, the sounds of gunfire, the death of a farm animal by starvation, verbal child abuse, and implied physical child abuse. There is also talk of a mind-altering substance and a depiction of its effects. The language is clean. There is a subplot of a pregnant teen; she is married but it was an arranged marriage that she didn’t want. I liked that there was a feminist perspective from a male, but I wished it went beyond the limited education for girls and more into explicitly addressing their arranged marriages. After middle grades or pre-teens, I would expect a memoir of this nature to be more graphic/explicit to reflect the realities of refugee life. This book gets bonus points for having a where-they-are-now update in the epilogue AND including real photos.
It falls short of a 5-star rating because of my thoughts on RESILIENCE & PERSEVERANCE. Omar may have very well been resilient, but his mental ability to recover quickly from depression or misfortune was not made clear. This was likely due to the condensing of several years into a 264-page sequential art memoir. There were understandably a lot of feelings of anger, anxiety, boredom, and hopelessness. He was most certainly persevering, but the beliefs that drove his perseverance were also not made clear. There were brief religious elements, and strong elements of community support and positive role models -- but no direct connection to whether those things helped inspire hope or determination. Instead, he gave us: “In a refugee camp, it felt like all you ever did was wait.”
It falls short of a 5-star rating because of my thoughts on RESILIENCE & PERSEVERANCE. Omar may have very well been resilient, but his mental ability to recover quickly from depression or misfortune was not made clear. This was likely due to the condensing of several years into a 264-page sequential art memoir. There were understandably a lot of feelings of anger, anxiety, boredom, and hopelessness. He was most certainly persevering, but the beliefs that drove his perseverance were also not made clear. There were brief religious elements, and strong elements of community support and positive role models -- but no direct connection to whether those things helped inspire hope or determination. Instead, he gave us: “In a refugee camp, it felt like all you ever did was wait.”