Sensitive and daring, moving and funny, Alice Rothchild's book is brilliantly written. It unapologetically and truthfully weaves the story of Palestine, then and now, through the life young Mohammad who lives in America. A great book for young people. -Miko Peled, The General's Son

Old Enough to Know is a wonderful, heartbreaking and inspirational journey into the lives of a quirky 9-year-old American boy, Mohammed, and his Palestinian family who have just moved to a new home. As he learns to adjust to life in a smaller town, he begins to learn of his family's history in Palestine through his grandmother's stories. Through these stories, Alice Rothchild touches on so many of the tribulations that the Palestinian people face and have faced since 1948 (the loss of land and loved ones, oppression, the cycle of violence inside and outside the home, collective punishment, child imprisonment and other injustices). Rothchild provides us with relief from these tragic stories with humor and the strong vivid characters in Mohammed's life making this painful topic accessible to younger readers. This is a much needed story for young adults, parents and teachers alike. -Laila Taji, These Chicks and My Grandfather Has a Donkey

Alice Rothchild's first middle grade book, Old Enough to Know, is a tour de force, embedding a sweeping view of Palestinian history in a story of children of recent immigrants learning to live in America. Middle graders, parents, and middle school teachers will find much here to fire their imaginations. This book is a page turner in its own right, quite apart from its pedagogical values. And it will also help parents and middle schoolers to begin conversations about the topics most important to kids transitioning from childhood to tentative self-definitions: how to be compassionate toward self and others, how to define themselves within the often too rich and too complicated array of options offered to teenagers, how to be interested in the culture and lore, the smells, sounds, tastes of other cultures without caricaturing people into an "exotic other," how to love nature and your grandparents' food while being enthralled with a new bicycle or a new computer. A must-read for all Middle Grade collections and schools, and also a compelling story for adults old and young to read. -Eve Spangler, Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict

More than a story of children struggling to be accepted into a new school, this tale weaves in their family history in another land, a dark narrative of loss and dispossession that also forms their identity. Poignant and heartbreaking, it is a story of reckoning with the past, while trying to navigate the present, in a world that does not understand. - Fida Jiryis, Stranger in My Own Land