Refugee Reading Level: A Complete Guide

What Reading Level Is Refugee?

By our editorial assessment, Refugee reads at a grade 5–7 level. The Flesch-Kincaid formula places it at approximately grade 5.3 — accessible to a confident fifth-grade reader at the sentence level. Gratz writes in a deliberately propulsive style: short chapters, clear prose, and a relentless forward momentum that keeps pages turning. The three-narrator structure, alternating between Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud in short bursts, is easy to track and gives the novel much of its energy.

The linguistic accessibility sits alongside genuine historical complexity. Each of the three storylines requires the reader to hold a different historical context — Nazi Germany and the St. Louis voyage, Castro-era Cuba and the Mariel boatlift’s legacy, the Syrian civil war and the European refugee crisis — and the novel moves between them quickly without extensive background explanation. Readers who come to it without prior knowledge of any of these periods will understand the emotional stakes immediately but may benefit from additional context for the historical specifics. This is one of the most productive aspects of the novel as a classroom text: it generates genuine curiosity about history that extends naturally into research.

For official Lexile and Accelerated Reader scores, visit Lexile.com or AR BookFinder. ReadingVine’s assessments are independent editorial judgments.

What Age Is Refugee Appropriate For?

We recommend Refugee for readers ages 10–14. The novel’s content is more intense than many books assigned at the same grade level, and parents should be prepared for a story that does not soften the violence, death, or desperation of its characters’ situations.

The novel’s intensity is inseparable from its argument: Gratz is asking the reader to understand what refugees actually face, and softening the danger would undermine the point. For readers ages 10 and up who are emotionally prepared for a demanding story, Refugee is one of the most effective and important books in the middle-grade catalog.

What Is Refugee About?

Josef Landler is thirteen years old in 1939, the son of a Jewish psychiatrist who has just been released from a concentration camp. His family boards the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying more than nine hundred Jewish refugees from Hamburg to Cuba, where they have visas and, they believe, safety. Josef’s father is still shattered from what he experienced in the camp. Josef must decide, over the course of a voyage that goes catastrophically wrong, what it means to be the man of the family — and what he is willing to do to protect the people he loves.

Isabel Fernandez is eleven years old in 1994, the daughter of a family in Castro’s Cuba where food is scarce and the economy has collapsed following the Soviet Union’s fall. When her father is arrested during a protest, the family makes the decision to flee on a homemade raft across the ninety miles of the Florida Straits to the United States. Their journey is measured in dwindling food and water, approaching storms, circling sharks, and the Coast Guard policy that will send them back if they are caught at sea rather than on land.

Mahmoud Bishara is twelve years old in 2015, a boy from Aleppo, Syria, who has learned that the safest way to survive in a city being bombed into rubble is to be invisible — to not draw attention, to not be noticed, to not exist in any way that makes you a target. When his family’s apartment building is destroyed, they join the millions of Syrians on the road to Europe, crossing the Aegean Sea in an overcrowded inflatable boat, navigating hostile borders, and living in the transit camps of a continent that mostly wishes they would go somewhere else.

Gratz alternates between the three stories in short chapters that build toward a convergence the reader senses coming but cannot quite predict. The historical connections between the three storylines are the novel’s most deliberate structural achievement: decisions made in 1939 echo through 1994 and 2015, and the question each story asks — who will open the door? who will let them in? — is always and obviously also a question about the present moment.

Refugee Characters

Is Refugee Banned?

Refugee has been challenged in a small number of school districts, primarily due to its depictions of violence, death, and the political content of the Syrian and Cuban storylines. It has appeared on some lists of challenged books but has not been widely banned and does not appear on the American Library Association’s most frequently challenged titles lists. The challenges that have occurred have generally not resulted in removal from curricula or library shelves.

The novel’s political subject matter — refugee policy, border enforcement, the history of countries turning away Jewish refugees during the Holocaust — has made it a target in some communities for concerns about political bias in school reading materials. Gratz has addressed these challenges publicly, noting that the novel presents historical facts rather than political arguments and that the experience of children being forced to flee their homes is not a political position but a human reality.

Refugee Themes and Lessons

The novel’s central argument — made through structure as much as through content — is that the refugee experience is not a recent phenomenon, not a problem specific to one region or religion or political moment, but a recurring human emergency that has always asked the same question of the people in a position to help: will you open the door? The three storylines are chosen to demonstrate that this question was asked in 1939, in 1994, and in 2015, and that the answers given have consequences that echo across generations. The structural connection between Josef’s story and the resolution of Mahmoud’s is the novel’s most explicit statement of this argument, and it lands with considerable force.

Mahmoud’s arc — from a boy who has made himself invisible to survive to a boy who steps forward and demands to be seen — is where Gratz makes his most personal argument about what it costs to be a refugee and what it costs to treat refugees as invisible. The strategy of erasure that has kept Mahmoud safe in Aleppo becomes, in Europe, a different kind of danger: the danger of a system that is only too willing to not notice you. His decision to stand in front of a car on a highway and force the people inside to see him is the novel’s moral turning point, and it is worth spending classroom time on what exactly he is demanding and why.

The novel is also, more quietly, about what people carry when they flee. Isabel’s trumpet. Josef’s sister. Mahmoud’s family. Gratz is consistent about insisting that every refugee is a person with specific, irreplaceable things they are trying to protect — not a category, not a crisis, not a political problem, but a person making terrible choices in impossible circumstances because the alternative is worse.

Discussion questions for classrooms and families: Why does Gratz tell three stories instead of one — what does the parallel structure argue that a single story couldn’t? What does Mahmoud mean when he decides to stop being invisible? What connections does the novel draw between the three storylines, and what is it saying about history? Josef makes a choice near the end of his story that is almost impossible to evaluate — how do you think about it? What does the novel suggest about the responsibility of people who are not refugees toward people who are?

How Many Pages and Chapters in Refugee?

The Scholastic paperback edition of Refugee is approximately 338 pages across 73 short chapters — the chapters alternate between Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud in a tight, rotating structure that rarely lets any single storyline run for more than a few pages before cutting to the next. At roughly 86,000 words, it is a substantial novel that reads considerably faster than its word count suggests because of the momentum Gratz builds through the alternating structure and the short chapter format. Most readers in the target age range finish it in one to two weeks, and many report being unable to stop once the three storylines begin to converge.

For classroom use, the novel works well in a three-week unit. The three-narrator structure is the most productive formal element to discuss — tracking the parallels between the three stories, the historical contexts each requires, and the connections Gratz builds between them gives students genuinely interesting analytical work to do alongside the emotional experience of the novel. A historical background component — on the MS St. Louis, on Cuban emigration policy, on the Syrian civil war — enriches the reading considerably and is worth building into the unit plan.

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About Alan Gratz

Alan Gratz was born in 1972 in Knoxville, Tennessee, and studied English and creative writing at the University of Tennessee. He worked for years as a teacher and a writer before his debut novel, Samurai Shortstop, was published in 2006. His subsequent novels have established him as one of the most consistently readable writers of historical fiction for middle-grade readers, with a particular gift for taking large historical subjects — World War II, the atomic bomb, the refugee crisis — and finding the human story at their center.

Refugee, published in 2017, became one of the best-selling middle-grade novels of the decade and is now among the most widely assigned books in American middle school classrooms. Its success has been attributed in part to its timing — published in the middle of the global refugee crisis and the American political debate over refugee admissions — and in part to Gratz’s structural ingenuity in finding a form that makes three separate historical stories feel like a single urgent argument. His subsequent novels include Allied, Ground Zero — which returns to the Afghanistan refugee experience — and Projekt 1065. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.