Kathrin Rohmann

Apple Cake & Baklava

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

My review for the Book Blog Tour for Apple Cake and Baklava, part of Refuge Week 2018:

In Apple Cake and Baklava, we meet Leila, an eleven-year-old Syrian girl who has fled her war-torn country with her mother and two brothers, and Max, a German boy who lives a very comfortable life in his rural village of Grossbödecke, playing football with his friends and baking Lebkuchen with his Granny Gertrud according to the family recipe handed down by Granny’s grandmother. Leila is glad to be in a new, safe, and clean country, but is deeply troubled by leaving her father Hassan, a well-known baker famous for his baklava, and her beloved Grandma, who is very ill, behind. Everything is unfamiliar at first, so Leila treasures the walnut she has brought with her all the way from her grandmother’s garden in Syria, and uses it to stay connected to her Syrian life and Grandma as she tries to adjust to her new home, often talking to it to seek her grandmother’s guidance or to help her feel brave when she is sad and missing her father and old life. When Leila joins Max’s class, Max becomes incredibly curious about his new classmate and starts to understand that his life has been very different from Leila’s, in English class during a lesson on “Moving House” realizing that he has never had to move house in his life and that he has never had to accept presents from strangers.

Max starts to question his own comfort and story as he learns more about how Leila and her family were granted asylum in Germany, how different his life is in comparison to Leila’s. What Leila and Max have in common, though, are close relationships with their grandmothers, with both children relying on their grandmothers for love, companionship, and advice. So when Lelia faints at school and loses the walnut her grandmother had given her, the walnut that she has carefully kept with her throughout her harrowing journey by boat from Syria to Germany, Max understands the importance of the walnut and Leila’s connection to her Grandma, and sets out to help her find it, in the process coming to see that Leila’s story has a very important connection to his own family’s story of exile during World War II, a story that Max might not ever have been aware of without Leila’s friendship. 

To read my full review, and learn more about the UK's annual Refuge Week, please visit my blog post on The Uncommon Reader: 

https://theuncommonreader.wordpress.com/

Refugee Week:

http://refugeeweek.org.uk/

Apple Cake & Baklava

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