Growing Up & Facts of Life
![Jerry Craft - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_jerry_craft.jpg)
New Kid
Winner of the Newbery Medal, Coretta Scott King Author Award, and Kirkus Prize for Young Readers' Literature!
Perfect for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Gene Luen Yang, New Kid is a timely, honest graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real, from award-winning author-illustrator Jerry Craft.
Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade.
As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds-and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself?
This middle grade graphic novel is an excellent choice for tween readers, including for summer reading.
New Kid is a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List.
Plus don't miss Jerry Craft's Class Act!
Perfect for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Gene Luen Yang, New Kid is a timely, honest graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real, from award-winning author-illustrator Jerry Craft.
Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade.
As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds-and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself?
This middle grade graphic novel is an excellent choice for tween readers, including for summer reading.
New Kid is a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List.
Plus don't miss Jerry Craft's Class Act!
Editorial Reviews
"Funny, sharp, and totally real! Jordan Banks is the kid everyone will be talking about!" - Jeff Kinney, Author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid
★"Possibly one of the most important graphic novels of the year." - Booklist (starred review)
★"An engrossing, humorous, and vitally important graphic novel that should be required reading in every middle school in America." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★"This is more than a story about being the new kid-it's a complex examination of the micro- and macroaggressions that Jordan endures from classmates and teachers. Highly recommended for all middle grade shelves." - School Library Journal (starred review)
★"This engaging story offers an authentic secondary cast and captures the high jinks of middle schoolers and the tensions that come with being a person of color in a traditionally white space." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
★ "Award-winning author/illustrator Jerry Craft confronts elitism, microaggression, racism, socioeconomic disparity and white privilege in a familiar setting. His preteen audiences will undoubtedly recognize and empathize with Craft's memorable cast." - Shelf Awareness, (starred review)
"Craft's full-color comics art is dynamic and expressive. This school story stands out as a robust, contemporary depiction of a preteen navigating sometimes hostile spaces yet staying true to himself thanks to friends, family, and art." - Horn Book Magazine
"New Kid is at once tender and tough, funny and heartbreaking. Hand this to the middle-grade reader in your life right away." - The New York Times Book Review
"This story captures the tensions that come with being a person of color in a traditionally white space." - Publishers Weekly
"Genuine characters propel this funny, warm, biting, fearless story. Entertaining and insightful, it will surely offer affirmation for some readers, revelation for others." - Cooperative Children's Book Center
"An honest and compelling read for any kid looking for a place to belong." - Scholastic Teacher Magazine...
★"Possibly one of the most important graphic novels of the year." - Booklist (starred review)
★"An engrossing, humorous, and vitally important graphic novel that should be required reading in every middle school in America." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★"This is more than a story about being the new kid-it's a complex examination of the micro- and macroaggressions that Jordan endures from classmates and teachers. Highly recommended for all middle grade shelves." - School Library Journal (starred review)
★"This engaging story offers an authentic secondary cast and captures the high jinks of middle schoolers and the tensions that come with being a person of color in a traditionally white space." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
★ "Award-winning author/illustrator Jerry Craft confronts elitism, microaggression, racism, socioeconomic disparity and white privilege in a familiar setting. His preteen audiences will undoubtedly recognize and empathize with Craft's memorable cast." - Shelf Awareness, (starred review)
"Craft's full-color comics art is dynamic and expressive. This school story stands out as a robust, contemporary depiction of a preteen navigating sometimes hostile spaces yet staying true to himself thanks to friends, family, and art." - Horn Book Magazine
"New Kid is at once tender and tough, funny and heartbreaking. Hand this to the middle-grade reader in your life right away." - The New York Times Book Review
"This story captures the tensions that come with being a person of color in a traditionally white space." - Publishers Weekly
"Genuine characters propel this funny, warm, biting, fearless story. Entertaining and insightful, it will surely offer affirmation for some readers, revelation for others." - Cooperative Children's Book Center
"An honest and compelling read for any kid looking for a place to belong." - Scholastic Teacher Magazine...
Readers Top Reviews
CocoHelen SofleyL
What a lovely book, very impressive, beautiful layout, excellent quality! Eye catching. Bought this for my 9 year old son and he loves it, the look, the feel. It's just different. I'm sure it will be an extraordinary read.
Barb in LondonCoc
I taught New Kid and its sequel Class Act to my Year 6 students this past Autumn term. All of my students loved it - so much so that they begged to follow up with Class Act as soon as we finished New Kid. Our school has diversity among staff members but not among students, and this gave them both insight and empathy into what it's like to feel singled out among your peers for your appearance alone. We also appreciated Jerry Craft's biography and FAQ on his website in which he details how New Kid is semi-autobiographical based on his experiences both as a student and as a parent of students in a predominantly white school. Highly recommend.
KarenKarenBarb in
The art work, the microaggressions, the freezing sports moments, the "Mean Streets of Uptown" book truth- this story contains so much truth and heart and will stick with me for awhile. This is a must have for middle school shelves!
ricardo is readin
Massive congratulations to Jerry Craft for winning the Newbery for New Kid! A graphic novel winning the medal! We are kind of living through a Golden Age of children's fiction, aren't we? It's good to stop every once in a while to just look around and actually notice. It's the whole point of awards.⠀ ⠀ New Kid follows Jordan Banks, a twelve-year-old kid about to start the seventh grade. A budding cartoonist, Jordan wishes for nothing more than to go to art school, but his parents, wishing him to have better opportunities than they had, decide to send him to a more affluent school. A prestigious private school, to be exact. A school where Jordan is one of the few kids of color. Being the new kid is hard enough, but this, in addition to coming from a more modest background than most of his peers, means dealing with a bunch of unwelcome challenges — not least of which being general ignorance and racism — as Jordan just tries to go about his days, trying to figure things out.⠀ ⠀ I really enjoyed New Kid. While I was not a huge fan of the artwork itself, the story and the writing definitely won me over. I really loved — and admired — how it maintained a light and fun tone while also exploring some heavy themes. It's a deceptively casual book in this way. There are depictions of class difference, of code-switching as a person of color, of casual racism and microaggressions, of privilege and lack thereof — and they are all portrayed in the same easy-going manner. Underneath this layer of mellow, though, there's a current of frustration and exasperation that runs all the way through, which makes this casual story lose none of its pointed poignancy. Because being a person of color in this world sometimes means keeping your cool even during the most uncomfortable of times, even if you're a child.⠀ ⠀ But these weighty subjects don't make up the whole of the story. Just as they don't make up the lives of the kids who have to deal with them. One of the central themes in New Kid has to do with Jordan's frustration with books about kids of color being extremely limited in scope: books about white kids can be about anything and still expected to be relatable; books about black kids can only be about Serious Issues and are expected to be read only by black kids. Books about white kids can be fun; books about black kids have to be severe and gritty. Jordan thinks this is extremely unfair nonsense. Because, yes, while kids like him may have to deal with more complicated situations than most others — at the end of the day they're also... just kids. Normal and goofy and beautiful and awkward and nerdy and clever kids who would love to do nothing more than just live and have fun and be happy and to see other kids like them doing likewise. This doesn't mean that books about Serious Issues are not important, only that reality is far more complex, and sto...
Michwaldorf_curri
This book was assigned by our school for summer reading and I wish I had looked into it more before purchasing - there is no chance my kid is reading this. While I understand the importance and need for kids to understand diversity, this book outwardly shames certain races and makes people of that race appear horribly.
