Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate

A Sudanese refugee's impressions of America and his slow adjustment witnessing the murders of his father and brother, then getting separated from his mother in an African camp, Kek alone believes that his mother has somehow survived. The boy has traveled by "flying boat" to Minnesota in winter to live with relatives who fled earlier. An onslaught of new sensations greets him and ordinary sights unexpectedly fill him with longing (a lone cow in a field reminds him of his father's herd; when he looks in his aunt's face, "I see my mother's eyes/ looking back at me").