THE NEW KIDS: BIG DREAMS AND BRAVE JOURNEYS...
By: Hauser, Brooke
Some walked across deserts and mountains to
get here. Others flew in on planes. One arrived after escaping in a suitcase.
And some won't say how they got here. These are "the new kids": new to America
and all the routines and rituals of an American high school, from lonely first
days to prom. They attend International High School at Prospect Heights in
Brooklyn, which is like most high schools in some ways--its halls are filled
with students gossiping, joking, flirting, and pushing the limits of the
school's dress code--but all of the students are recent immigrants learning
English. Together, they come from more than forty-five countries and speak more
than twenty-eight languages. A singular work of narrative journalism, The New
Kids chronicles a year in the life of a remarkable group of these teenage
newcomers--a multicultural mosaic that embodies what is truly amazing about
America. Hauser's unforgettable portraits include Jessica, kicked out of her
father's home just days after arriving from China; Ngawang, who spent
twenty-four hours folded up in a small suitcase to escape from Tibet; Mohamed, a
diamond miner's son from Sierra Leone whose arrival in New York City is shrouded
in mystery; Yasmeen, a recently orphaned Yemeni girl who is torn between
pursuing college and marrying so that she can take care of her younger siblings;
and Chit Su, a Burmese refugee who is the only person to speak her language in
the entire school. The students in this modern-day Babel deal with enormous
obstacles: traumas and wars in their countries of origin that haunt them, and
pressures from their cultures to marry or drop out and go to work. They aren't
just jostling for their places in the high school pecking order--they are
carving out new lives for themselves in America. The New Kids is immersion
reporting at its most compelling as Brooke Hauser takes us deep inside the
dramas of five International High School students who are at once ordinary and
extraordinary in their separate paths to the American Dream. Readers will be
rooting for these kids long after reading the stories of where they came from,
how they got here, and where they are going next. TitlePeek
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