Butterfly

When the dinghy carrying Yusra Mardini and nineteen others from Turkey to Greece began taking on water, she and her sister got into the sea and helped push it for more than three hours. She was seventeen. A year later she swam at the Rio Olympics on the first Refugee Olympic Team. Her memoir covers the war in Damascus, the crossing, and what arriving actually felt like. It was an Our Shared Shelf pick in a cycle themed on refugees.