The Boy at the Back of the Class, by Onjali Q Rauf

Author: Onjali Q Rauf. Review by Edie Searle, aged eleven.

I thought this was a really good book. It made me think a lot about refugees and how badly they are treated here in this country.

I couldn’t think of anything worse than arriving in a strange country where I didn’t speak the language, after I had recently lost both of my parents. Just thinking about it made me gasp.

We had a boy called Mustafa in our class when we were in primary school. He was a refugee who didn’t have much English but, unlike Ahmet, his parents were with him. I don’t know where they were living though.

Mustafa didn’t have to sit at the back of the class, but I just thought Ahmet sat there in the book because that was where there was a space. I did think that the teacher could have explained to the other children what had happened to him before he arrived, and that might have helped them not to stare at him. At least the teacher could have introduced him to the class by name, and explained that he didn’t speak our language yet. Then the children might have understood better why he didn’t join them in the playground, but was ‘kept in’.

Some of the children in our school encouraged Mustafa to say inappropriate stuff. At Ahmet’s school, the fact that he wasn’t introduced at all just made the children more curious about him.

I thought the plan the children made when they realised the awful position that Ahmet was in, to visit Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to help find his parents, was very unrealistic. It did make it a fun story to read though.

We would never have got away with going to London on the train on our own. I might just have been able to do it with my friend Abby. We wouldn’t have expected to get into Buckingham Palace, but I loved how Ahmet’s parents were found in the end, after all the police and the press got involved.

I think other children would enjoy this book too, so it’s a good one for Grannies to give to them, and for them to read themselves too.

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