Reviewed by Deborah Menkart
Review Source: Rethinking Schools
Book Author: Nora Lester Murad
Middle school student Ida tries to sit where she is “unnoticeable, like the dust on last year’s history books.” She seeks to avoid stereotypical insults hurled at her for being from a Palestinian immigrant family. The school’s silence aggravates the problem. Ida notes, “Nobody even says the word ‘Palestine’ in my school. The teachers are afraid to teach anything about the Middle East, even if the topic has nothing to do with politics.”
As the mother of three girls raised in the West Bank and now living in the United States, author Nora Lester Murad is deeply grounded in the book’s characters and themes. And she knows how to captivate middle school readers. Ida eats an olive that sends her time traveling from her home in Massachusetts to her family’s home in the West Bank, introducing readers to both the beauty of their village and the violence of the Israeli occupation that eventually forced her family to leave for their safety. This experience gives Ida the courage and conviction to speak in a school assembly about the realities of the occupation, comparing it to what happened to “Indigenous peoples here. How they were pushed off their land and survived so much violence, as if they weren’t human.”
Stepping out of the shadows, she insists that students and teachers see her and her family’s humanity.
Deborah Menkart is executive director at Teaching for Change.
Find more recommended books about this topic on our Palestine booklist.
Ida in the Middle by Nora Lester Murad
Published by Interlink Publishing Group Incorporated on May 7, 2024
Genres: Palestine
Pages: 224
Reading Level: Grades 6-8
ISBN: 9781623716868
Review Source: Rethinking Schools
Ida, a Palestinian-American girl, eats a magic olive that takes her to the life she might have had in her parents’ village near Jerusalem. An important coming of age story that explores identity, place, voice, and belonging.
Every time violence erupts in the Middle East, Ida knows what’s coming next. Some of her classmates treat her like it’s all her fault — just for being Palestinian! In eighth grade, Ida is forced to move to a different school. But people still treat her like she’ll never fit in. Ida wishes she could disappear.
One day, dreading a final class project, Ida hunts for food. She discovers a jar of olives that came from a beloved aunt in her family’s village near Jerusalem. Ida eats one and finds herself there — as if her parents had never left Palestine! Things are different in this other reality — harder in many ways, but also strangely familiar and comforting. Now she has to make some tough choices. Which Ida would she rather be? How can she find her place?
Ida’s dilemma becomes more frightening as the day approaches when Israeli bulldozers are coming to demolish another home in her family’s village….
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