Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini
Reviewed by Hania Mariën
Audience: Ages 9+
Written as a prayer from a father cradling his sleeping son on the shores of the Mediterranean, waiting to flee their home - Homs, Syria - Sea Prayer captures both nostalgia for home and hope for an uncertain future.
Read along with REACH founder and director Sarah Dryden-Peterson as part of the “Books of Belonging” series at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The father’s prayer juxtaposes his own beautiful memories of his family’s farmhouse outside of Homs, with cool air and bleating goats, with his son’s reality of bombs, starvation, burials. Khaled Hosseini’s book captures the painful sentiment of both leaving home, and never having known a home that was safe.
Readers step into the shoes of a parent making the “choice” to leave everything they have known - and embark with the father and son on the perilous trip across the Mediterranean, for what they hope is a more peaceful future.
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Video series | Books of Belonging
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