The night the armed soldiers arrive to relocate the Amin family, Layla is studying for her homeschooling class in literature. She reads an Emily Dickinson poem, which begins with the famous line, “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” The poem suggests both the fragility and necessity of hope in even the darkest time.

That refrain runs throughout Layla’s harrowing experience at the internment camp. At the darkest moments—as when the heroic Soheil throws himself against the camp’s electrified fence—Layla refuses to concede the need to hope—hope that the country at large will see the immorality of the government policy, hope that the guards already sympathetic to the internees will triumph, and hope that David will persevere in his efforts to open the eyes of the country through social media. “When people lose hope, that’s when the authorities know they’ve broken you” (122), she tells herself, as she begins to hatch plots of resistance and even escape in the early days of her internment. In recruiting a reluctant Ayesha, Layla tells her that if a person does not at least try to oppose tyranny, they are left only with “hopeless” (188) surrender.