A young girl is awakened by her cousin tugging at her foot. The time has come, and they must
leave. Nadia cowers beneath her bed and kicks at the older Razan: she can hear the sound of
screeching barmeela, see the explosions of barrel bombs that have not yet fallen, feel the hot
shrapnel rip through her legs again. Nadia will not leave the safe fortress beneath her
bed, and yet she must: Aleppo is no longer safe.

Nadia’s worst horror settles in uncomfortably, as her family flees their apartment in the Salaheddine district, one of Syria’s largest cities, the barmeela crashes above, bringing her former home crumbling down around her.

Alone, injured, and without shelter, Nadia must journey through the dystopian wasteland of a
once flourishing country; surviving the elements, hunger, and the bloodthirsty mercenaries of
Bashar Al-Assad to find her family.

Naheed Hasnat’s fourth novel follows eleven-year-old Nadia through war-ravaged Aleppo as
she journeys out of the ruined city to reunite with her family at the Turkish border.

The novel is a winding journey through memory and destruction, reminiscent of post-apocalyptic
young adult science fiction of late. Nadia calls to mind Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games
or Tris Prior of Divergent: a flawed but indomitable heroine in a wasted landscape controlled by
an insatiable despot and his innumerable and often invisible cronies.

There are only a few key differences between Nadia and other heroines of recent young adult
dystopian fiction. The first and most glaring dissimilarity is that Nadia’s story is real. The Syria
she struggles to escape and the dangers within it are real. Her story echoes thousands, millions
of stories of child refugees across the globe fleeing from war, drought, famine, and genocide.
Our collective apathy towards these children who live in our own world, the persecution of these
children by European and American governments, the denial of these children by Arab
governments are all too horrifyingly real.

Second, while Katniss and Tris narrate their own stories, Nadia’s story is fittingly told in an
omniscient third voice. We are outsiders to Nadia’s struggle. The story is not a door to her
experience, but a window on her pain. We sit, far-away witnesses, removed from a tragedy we
barely understand and catch a glimpse of Nadia’s crumbling world as Hasnat expertly unravels
the beginnings of the Syrian civil war through Nadia’s reminiscence.

In addition to being a well-paced and detailed heroine’s journey, Escape from Aleppo is also an
exceedingly well-researched primer on the Syrian civil war and the Arab Spring. This book is so
intimate and yet so broadly accessible it should be read by adolescents and adults alike who
wish to understand the refugee crisis in Syria and the Middle East.

Nadia’s story immediately inspires empathy, as she is a character who is so accessible we can
immediately identify with her. A young girl formerly obsessed with nail polish and Arab Idol, she
longs now only for normalcy. Like Nadia, as we follow her through the hollow remnants of her
once beautiful city. We become nostalgic for pre-war Syria and anxious for the uncertain future;
the future that rests on the narrow shoulders of wounded, traumatized children like Nadia.

The glimpses of Arab and Muslim culture will feel foreign to non-Arab and non-Muslim readers
But bittersweet to Arabs and Muslims who know the songs of Fairouz and Umm Kulthum as
well as they know their mother’s voice. Some of us will taste zhourat tea with Nadia, while
others wonder at a taste they cannot conceive of.

A fascinating parallel that must be drawn between Katniss Everdeen and young Nadia: both of
their worlds are foreign, and yet, while Katniss has cemented herself in our literary and
cinematic history, the real Nadia’s of our world scream and their cries fall on deaf ears, simply
because their cries echo in a foreign tongue.

In an America that has no room for the real Nadia’s of this world, will readers show Nadia the
same compassion that they did Katniss Everdeen? Can we weep with Nadia when she hugs
herself tightly, abandoned by her family, alone in a war-zone, the way we cried for Katniss when
she hugged her sister for the last time before heading into The Hunger Games? Can we cheer
for Nadia when she reunites with mischievous feline MishMish, the way we did when Katniss
recovered Prim’s beloved cat Buttercup?

As a believable and lovable new champion in young adult dystopian literature, Nadia is valuable
not only because of the well-crafted story Hasnat weaves around her, but because she makes
us question ourselves and our dedication to the heroines of this genre. If Aleppo, (far less
foreign than the make-believe world of Panem) does not connect with readers it will not be due
to a failing of Hasnat’s writing or Nadia’s narrative, it will be a failing of the imagination of an
an audience which can see Katniss Everdeen as a flesh-and-blood girl but chooses to abandon
Nadia and the real daughters of Syria she represents as being too foreign, too unreal to be
worthy of its time.