The Waiting Place: When Home Is Lost and a New One Not Yet Found

Praise

The stories are infused with empathy and understanding. . . Nayeri’s writing and Miralpeix’s photographs put faces on the immigration and forced migration crisis in the world. . . this is a book to be read and discussed.
—School Library Connection (starred review)

An important nonfiction tool in social emotional learning to draw attention to the harsh realities facing refugee children around the world.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

The afterword by Nayeri, herself a former child refugee from Iran forced to wait for resettlement, stresses the importance of centering our common humanity, calling on governments and readers to act. . . A window into life in a refugee camp.

—Kirkus Reviews

An unflinching look at the lives of a group of refugee children from Afghanistan and Iran. . . Sparse text combined with Miralpeix’s arresting full-page color photographs intimately capture the kids’ daily lives. . . . For American readers, this moving look at these young people and their hopes and dreams could lead to greater understanding and empathy for all displaced youth.

—Booklist

In this powerful photo-essay, the Waiting Place is the Katsikas refugee camp in Greece. . . the strength of the volume is its focus on real children, including five-year-old Matin from Afghanistan, his friends Ahmad and Hashmat, and his ten-year-old sister Mobina and her friends. Both text and photos compassionately humanize young refugees. . . readers will come away with a deeper understanding of the refugee crisis.
—The Horn Book

Photographs by Anna Bosch Miralpeix form the illustration for what becomes a tender but sobering account of the daily routines for children who have fled Iran and Afghanistan. . . . In an impassioned afterword, Ms. Nayeri implores adult readers who have shared the book with children to do more to alleviate the suffering of people around the world who have been cruelly exiled to places not of their choosing.
—The Wall Street Journal

Poetic and dreamlike, urgent and sobering, The Waiting Place offers an intimate and unflinching look into a refugee camp where displaced children live in makeshift homes made out of shipping containers, waiting to be released into a new place and life. At once a story, a historical record, and a call to action, this haunting and essential book bears witness to one of the great humanitarian issues of our times.

—Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country and The Tenth Muse

Bosch Miralpeix’s photographs provide an intimate glimpse of the camp and its quarters. . . the focus on children’s daily life grounds the volume, offering rich conversation starters about refugee experiences and mass displacement.
—Publishers Weekly

Dina Nayeri — herself a former refugee — takes a simple, stunning idea, a tour of the Katsikas refugee camp in Greece, and turns it into both a poetic essay on those lost in limbo and individual portraits of the young people there hoping for safety, freedom and a chance to begin living ordinary lives again.
—The Virginian Pilot