The Year the Maps Changed
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Wolf Hollow meets The Thing About Jellyfish in Danielle Binks’s debut middle grade novel set in 1999, where a twelve-year-old girl grapples with the meaning of home and family amidst a refugee crisis that has divided her town.
"Timeless and beautiful, and it deserves to be read by people of all ages." —Printz Award-winning author Melina Marchetta
If you asked eleven-year-old Fred to draw a map of her family, it would be a bit confusing. Her birth father was never in the picture, her mom died years ago, and her stepfather, Luca, is now expecting a baby with his new girlfriend. According to Fred’s teacher, maps don’t always give the full picture of our history, but more and more it feels like Fred’s family is redrawing the line of their story . . . and Fred is feeling left off the map.
Soon after learning about the baby, Fred hears that the town will be taking in hundreds of refugees seeking safety from a war-torn Kosovo. Some people in town, like Luca, think it’s great and want to help. Others, however, feel differently, causing friction within the community.
Fred, who has been trying to navigate her own feelings of displacement, ends up befriending a few refugees. But what starts as a few friendly words in Albanian will soon change their lives forever, not to mention completely redrawing Fred’s personal map of friends, family, and home, and community.
In a year of upheaval, Fred learns that the most important maps are the ones we draw for ourselves—and that lines on a page can’t contain the human heart.
A Coming of Age Story: Eleven-year-old Fred must navigate a new family, a new baby on the way, and a town divided by crisis, all while figuring out who she is.Grief and Found Family: With her mom gone and her stepfather starting a new life, Fred searches for her place in the world, discovering that family isn’t always about blood.Social Justice for Young Readers: When Kosovar refugees arrive in her small Australian town, Fred is forced to confront prejudice and discover the true meaning of compassion.Immersive 1999 Setting: Set against the backdrop of the Y2K scare and the Kosovo War, this story captures a pivotal moment in history through the eyes of a child.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in a small Australian town in 1999, Binks's character-driven debut novel follows 11-year-old Winifred "Fred" Owen-Ricci through a complicated year of change that stretches her understanding of personal as well as global responsibility. Since her mother died when Fred was six, she has been raised in a cozy family unit with her police officer stepfather, Luca, and her beloved maternal grandfather, Pop. When Luca's new girlfriend and her 10-year-old son move in, Fred begrudgingly tries to adapt. Soon, the family's community also expands—in some cases also begrudgingly—with the arrival of 400 Kosovar Albanian refugees escaping war in Kosovo. Guided and challenged by ethically driven adults around her—including a thoughtfully drawn history teacher who awakens and nurtures her interest in geography—Fred grapples with the concept of a moral compass and with her changing community and relationships, especially when tragedy hits home. Acknowledging the mark of colonialism on Australia's history, and including a parallel secondary arc about Fred's Vietnamese neighbors, Binks engages Fred's emotionally grounded, intelligently questioning narrative to look at the way "maps lie. Or at least, they don't always tell the truth." Protagonists largely read as white. Ages 8–12.
