Garden Heights · Independent Novel Study

Refugee

a novel by Alan Gratz

One story, three children, three eras. Josef flees Nazi Germany in 1939 aboard a ship bound for Cuba; Isabel pushes a homemade boat off a Havana beach in 1994; Mahmoud walks out of bombed Aleppo in 2015 toward a Europe that keeps closing its doors. Alan Gratz (author) rotates among the three narrators chapter by chapter, and as their dangerous journeys unfold, small echoes across the decades slowly braid the three stories into one. These 8 Part workbooks cover the full novel, with vocabulary, comprehension, literary analysis, Think Deeper reasoning, SAT & TOEFL-style practice, and writing, all built on real-world CLIL background.

Level 6Interactive & auto-gradedCLIL-based

Level 6 · Expert ReadersUS Grades 7–8Lexile 800LAR (ATOS) 5.3Sydney Taylor Book Award (2018)

📖 Get the right book: our workbooks follow the Scholastic Press (hardcover) edition — ISBN 9780545880831. All recommended editions →

Subject Personalities

The real-world subjects this novel study leans into — the depth behind every Knowledge Bank and reading passage.

PRIMARY LENS

🌎 Three Refugee Crises — History, Law & the Geography of Flight

The real history behind each narrator — Jewish families fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, Cuba’s 1994 balsero exodus, and Syria’s civil war in 2015 — joined to how flight actually works: asylum and refugee law, visas and borders, and the sea routes and land routes a family must survive.

SUPPORTING

🤝 Moral Courage — Bystanders, Helpers & Being Seen

Why some people help strangers while whole nations look away — the psychology of bystanders, the risks helpers take, and what the novel argues about staying invisible versus standing up to be seen.

SUPPORTING

🧵 The Braided Narrative — Three Voices, One Story

How Alan Gratz (author) builds a novel from three rotating narrators — cliffhanger handoffs, parallel images that echo across eras, and the craft of braiding separate journeys into a single design.

8-Part Novel Study

Choose a Part

Progress

PT1

Part 1 · Chapters 1–7

A Night of Shattered Glass in Berlin • Riots on the Havana Seawall • An Airstrike Tears Open Mahmoud’s Home in Aleppo

VocabularyComprehensionLiterary ElementsThink DeeperStandardized TestWriting

Start →

PT2

Part 2 · Chapters 8–14

Josef Boards a Grand Ship Bound for Cuba • A Homemade Boat Slips Into the Night Sea • The Long Road Out of Syria Begins

VocabularyComprehensionLiterary ElementsThink DeeperStandardized TestWriting