Other Words for Home Reading Level: A Complete Guide

What Reading Level Is Other Words for Home?

The Lexile of 930L is higher than the reading experience of the book would suggest, and this is a consistent feature of novels in verse scored by the Lexile formula. The 930L reflects the formula’s treatment of the condensed, white-space-heavy lines of free verse — the shorter lines score differently than equivalent prose — and overstates the actual reading demands. The ATOS of 5.3 is a more reliable guide to prose complexity. The word count of 30,180 — considerably less than most prose novels of similar page count — indicates how much white space is on each page. Most readers in the recommended age range find the verse format makes the book read faster and more accessibly than a prose novel of equivalent depth. Our assessment: grades 4–7, ages 9–13. For official scores, visit Lexile.com or AR BookFinder.

The Novel-in-Verse Format — A Note for New Readers

Other Words for Home is written entirely in free verse — poems rather than paragraphs, with white space where sentences would be in prose. This is not a poetry collection but a continuous narrative told through poems. For readers new to the format, a few things to know: each poem is a scene or moment, not a complete chapter; the line breaks carry meaning (where Warga breaks a line often creates emphasis or creates a pause that prose couldn’t); and reading verse aloud — even quietly to yourself — brings out the rhythm and the weight of individual lines in a way that silent reading sometimes misses.

The verse format is one reason the Lexile overstates the reading challenge. Readers who approach the book expecting prose will find it surprisingly fast and emotionally immediate; the white space and the compressed lines make each page feel more rather than less readable. The format is also what gives the book its emotional impact: Warga can say in twelve words what prose would take a paragraph to build, and the concentration of the verse makes each image and each moment land with more weight.

What Is Other Words for Home About?

Jude loves her life in Syria. She loves the Mediterranean, she loves movies, she loves her father and her brother Issa and her friends. Then the violence that has been distant becomes close: Issa joins the rebellion against the Assad government, and Jude’s father decides his pregnant wife and twelve-year-old daughter cannot stay. He sends them to Cincinnati, where Uncle Mazin — a doctor with a large house — can take them in. For a short visit. No one says how short.

In Cincinnati, Jude discovers that America is not quite the place the movies suggested. Everything is too fast and too loud. Her English, which she thought was good enough, requires more effort than she expected. Her cousin Sarah would rather not be responsible for her. The category “Middle Eastern” is a new identity she has never had to navigate — one that comes with other people’s assumptions about who she is and what she represents. At the same time: there are unexpected kindnesses, a new friend, a family growing to love her, and a school musical she might just audition for. And there are her father’s voice on the phone and Issa’s occasional messages, reminders that the people she loves are still somewhere, still alive, still waiting for a world that gets safer.

The book is divided into six parts. It follows Jude through her first year in Cincinnati — the disorientation, the slow settling, the specific work of building a life somewhere you didn’t plan to be.

Jude’s Decision to Wear Hijab

One of the book’s most specific and most discussed moments is when Jude, having started her period and reached the age at which her faith tradition invites the decision, chooses to begin wearing hijab. This is presented as her own positive decision — something she wants to do, something that feels right to her — and Warga handles it without exoticizing or over-explaining. For classroom use, the moment is a productive opportunity for discussion about religious practice as a personal choice rather than an external imposition. Jude’s choice is not presented as something done to her; it is presented as something she does. This is the kind of representation that the book’s fans, and the educators who have put it on reading lists, have specifically praised.

Other Words for Home Themes and Lessons

The book’s central argument is about the word “lucky” — a word Jude encounters repeatedly in America from people who mean well and who think her escape from Syria means she should feel fortunate. Warga uses Jude’s wrestling with this word across the novel to explore what is lost in the refugee’s journey even when the journey is, in the most essential sense, successful. Jude is safe. She is also separated from her father, her brother, her home, her language, her self as she understood it. Both things are true simultaneously, and the book insists on holding both.

The verse format is specifically appropriate to this content: the compressed, concentrated lines mirror the experience of having to compress yourself to fit a new context, of having your language reduced to what you can manage rather than what you want to say. As Jude’s English improves, the lines become slightly more expansive — a formal choice that reflects her growing capacity in the new language.

Discussion questions: What does Jude mean when she says the word “lucky” tastes “sweet with promise and bitter with responsibility”? What does Jude carry from Syria that America doesn’t see? What surprises her about America — and what surprises her about herself? Why is the book in verse — what does the format add that prose couldn’t?

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About Jasmine Warga

Jasmine Warga was born on April 24, 1988, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to an American mother and an immigrant Jordanian father. She grew up between two cultures and carries a Lebanese-Jordanian heritage that informs her writing about immigrant and refugee experience. She studied at Northwestern University. Other Words for Home (2019) was her first middle-grade novel and her first novel in verse; she was inspired to write it after visiting a Syrian family friend in 2013 and observing the interactions between his cousins born in America and cousins who had come from Syria. During the writing process, she interviewed members of Cincinnati’s Syrian community. Her subsequent middle-grade novel A Rover’s Story (2023) — narrated by a Mars rover — became a #1 New York Times bestseller. She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Illinois.