Where the Streets Had a Name by Randa Adbel-Fattah

I really liked this book--I love reading about real, modern-day kids in other countries,and I like stories where people are presented realistically, not in a phony good-guy/bad-guy scenario. This book meets both criteria wonderfully! Hayaat and her best friend, Samy, live in Bethlehem and have hatched a plan to travel to Jerusalem to visit her grandmother's former home--but it is illegal for them to go into Jerusalem. Even a trip to a neighboring town takes hours because of the checkpoints residents must go through to travel short distances, and because of the wall that now separates families and former neighbors. But Hayaat knows her grandmother can never return to Jerusalem to visit her beloved home--confiscated by the Israeli government and turned over to Jewish settlers--so Hayaat is determined to bring back some Jerusalem soil in a jar. Things don't quite go as planned, and both Samy and Hayaat come to terms with some painful past experiences on the journey.