The author of the book is Zeina Abriched. The main character is Zeina when she was a child about the book is telling a story about her childhood experience in the muslim and christian civil war. Life was really hard for their family, they had to deal with food shortages, water shortages, electricity shortages and all kinds of problems. The school bus wouldn’t even pick the children’s up because they live in a war zone. So everyday 6:30 in the morning parents need to send the kids to the ice cream shop to board the bus to school.  On day Zeina had to sleep in a near by gym because a gun fight broke out.

Summary: The story begun by describing her mother’s car which is the R12 which was constantly being hit by bullets. When the author wrote about the Renault R12 it probably symbolizes that Zeina’s family isn’t that poor, They even have a car and they family members like her dad smokes cigarettes everyday. Especially during war time I thought that a lot of items will go out of stock but they always have a platter of cigarettes on the table.

Brief information: The book is mainly about the civil war that happend in Lebanon which is a war about the Christians and Muslims it lasted for 15 years from 1975-1990.  Which was Zeina’s childhood.

I really recommend this book because people could understand how hard and complicated refugee’s life is, also they could see the world and the war in a refugee’s perspective and also a child’s perspective about the war.

Main Idea: In my opinion the main idea is sympathy for refugees. Because Zeina’s family is a refuge and they travel everywhere but couldn’t find a city or country to settle down.  Zeina’s family looks pretty happy most of the time in the book maybe because Zeina is too small and dosen’t really understand the pain of war and the damage it can do until they went downtown.  When they looked at the buildings that were broken, burned and bombed into pieces they felt kind of sad especially when they saw grandpa’s shop.

Another main idea is war is bad for everyone, everyone gets affected by the war for example the loss of life, environmental damage to the one and only earth, destruction of cities and people’s homes and humans suffering. Another big impact is on economics, war can lead to inflation and lots pf small businesses and shops will close down due to the loss of people’s savings, thus that will also lead to less money so that means that people would not have enough money to buy food everyday and life will get harder and harder for people.

Key Words: War, War zone, refugee, life.

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