When a teenage girl's single mom is taken by ICE, everything changes-all of her hopes and dreams for the future have turned into survival.
Seventeen-year-old Rania is shaken awake in her family's apartment in Brooklyn. ICE is at the door, taking her mother away. But Ammi has done everything right, hasn't she? Their asylum case is fine.
This was supposed to be Rania's greatest summer: hanging out with her best friend, Fatima, and getting ready for college in the fall.
But it's 2019, and nothing is certain.
Now, along with her younger brother, Kamal, and a new friend, Carlos, Rania must figure out how to survive. A road trip leads to searching for answers to questions she didn't even think to ask.
In this vivid exploration of what happens when the country you have put your hopes into is fast shutting down, award-winning author Marina Budhos shows us how one girl bursting with dreams navigates secrets, love, and the lure of the open road.
In the tumult of 1970s New York City, seventh graders are bussed from their neighborhood in Queens to integrate a new school in South Jamaica.
Jamila Clarke. Josie Rivera. Francesca George. Three mixed-race girls, close friends whose immigrant parents worked hard to settle their families in a neighborhood with the best schools. The three girls are outsiders there, but they have each other.
Now, at the start seventh grade, they are told they will be part of an experiment, taking a long bus ride to a brand-new school built to 'mix up the black and white kids.' Their parents don't want them to be experiments. Francesca's send her to a private school, leaving Jamila and Josie to take the bus ride without her.
While Francesca is testing her limits, Josie and Jamila find themselves outsiders again at the new school. As the year goes on, the Spanish girls welcome Josie, while Jamila develops a tender friendship with a boy--but it's a relationship that can exist only at school.
An extraordinary and timely novel, a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor Book, examines what it's like to grow up under surveillance in America.
Be careful what you say and who you say it to. Anyone might be a watcher.
Naeem is a Bangledeshi teenager living in Queens who thinks he can charm his way through anything. But then mistakes catch up with him. So do the cops, who offer him an impossible choice: spy on his Muslim neighbors and report back to them on shady goings-on, or face a police record. Naeem wants to be a hero-a protector. He wants his parents to be proud of him. But as time goes on, the line between informing and entrapping blurs. Is he saving or betraying his community?
Inspired by actual surveillance practices in New York City and elsewhere, Marina Budhos's extraordinary and timely novel examines what it's like to grow up with Big Brother always watching. Naeem's riveting story is as vivid and involving as today's headlines.
Walter Dean Myers Award Honor Book, We Need Diverse Books
Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor Book
YALSA Best YA Fiction for Young Adults
"A fast-moving, gripping tale." -SLJ, Starred
Since emigrating from Bangladesh, fourteen-year-old Nadira and her family have been living in New York City on expired visas, hoping to realize their dream of becoming legal U.S. citizens. But after 9/11, everything changes. Suddenly being Muslim means you are dangerous--a suspected terrorist. When Nadira's father is arrested and detained at the U.S.-Canadian border, Nadira and her older sister, Aisha, are told to carry on as if everything is the same. The teachers at Flushing High don't ask any questions, but Aisha falls apart. Nothing matters to her anymore--not even college. It's up to Nadira to be the strong one and bring her family back together again.
