Hope Against Hope

Geraldlynn is a lively, astute 14-year-old. Her family, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, returns home to find a radically altered public education system. Geraldlynn's parents hope their daughter's new school will prepare her for college--but the teenager has ideals and ambitions of her own.

Aidan is a fresh-faced Harvard grad drawn to New Orleans by the possibility of bringing change to a flood-ravaged city. He teaches at an ambitious charter school with a group of newcomers determined to show the world they can use science, data, and hard work to build a model school.

Mary Laurie is a veteran educator who becomes principal of one of the first public high schools to reopen after Katrina. Laurie and her staff find they must fight each day not only to educate the city's teenagers, but to keep the Walker community safe and whole.

In this powerful narrative non-fiction debut, the lives of these three characters provide readers with a vivid and sobering portrait of education in twenty-first-century America. Hope Against Hope works in the same tradition as Random Family and There Are No Children Here to capture the challenges of growing up and learning in a troubled world.

“Of the many dreams and schemes for upgrading New Orleans after Katrina, the overhaul of the city’s public schools is the one that really happened. America’s heaviest big-city bet on charter schools has been convulsive and controversial. Sarah Carr offers readers a ringside seat on an attempted revolution. No one who cares about public education in America can afford to ignore this balanced and vivid account.”—Jed Horne, author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City

“If you read just just one book about contemporary education reform, it should be Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope. Geraldlynn, Aidan, and Mary Laurie are unforgettable characters, whose complex lives challenge the talking points and political pieties so common to the debate over public schools, poverty, and race. Carr has set a new bar for all of us writing about education in America.”—Dana Goldstein, education journalist and Schultze Fellow at the New America Foundation

National print, online, and broadcast media campaign
Outreach to politicians focused on education reform
Author blog tour and Skype events
Digital assets: author Q&A, essays, excerpts
Author events on the Gulf Coast