It isn't often that we get a refugee story that doesn't end with the main character in a new home in the west, opportunity wide open in front of them. Hughes presents us instead with a family trapped by poverty, in a country already stretched thin for resources. This is a scenario where they were once helped by NGOs but that funding has dried up. The best Hadi can hope for is a slight improvement in circumstances, a situation where he may be able to go to school, where his family may have enough to eat without begging. The greatest value to a book like this one is putting a human face to a crisis.

This is such a timely book. It shines a light on the challenges that Syrian refugees face while trying to survive in the countries that they have fled to. For this book, that means Lebanon. Lebanon which is a small country of around 6 million and has hosted up to 1 million refugees since the Syrian Civil War started.

And that was before the August 4th explosion in Beirut, which hit the Syrian refugee community hard as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

We first meet Hadi, a young Syrian teen, on a rainy intersection in Beirut where his job is to approach cars to see whether he can sell gum to the drivers. The fact that not many drivers purchase gum from him, just highlights how desperate the situation is for him and his family. His dad also works on another intersection. On a good day, they might make enough to feed their family a meager diet and save a little bit each day to pay the monthly rent and electricity bills.

One day Malek, another Syrian refugee, comes to Hadi’s intersection and tells him that he is going to have to clear out because a gang lord has decided that he controls who can sell at this corner. They eventually strike up a friendship.

This book keeps on going from bad to worse and what’s heartbreaking is all the small moments of goodness that provide Hadi with some degree of hope get quickly dashed by the next bad thing that happens. Hadi’s life seems to be in danger in so many different ways. Kahlil Gibran’s book “The Prophet” also significantly figures into this book. What’s most striking about Hadi is the level of dignity that he keeps on trying to uphold in spite of the horrible things that people tell him.

Author Dean Hughes wrote this book after he and his wife Kathy spent a year and a half teaching English to Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Beirut. His source material came from the stories of their students.