The New Kids

In the tradition of Random Family and There Are No Children Here, this important, singular work of entertaining, heartbreaking, and illuminating narrative journalism chronicles a year in the life of a remarkable group of immigrant students at the vibrant International High School at Prospect Heights in Brooklyn-a multicultural stew that embodies what is truly amazing about America.

Inspired by the author's widely acclaimed 2008 New York Times article, "This Strange Thing Called Prom," New American High is immersion reporting at its most compelling. Brooke Hauser takes us deep inside a unique New York City high school over the course of a year as she follows diverse newcomers whose lives are at once ordinary and extraordinary, international headlines brought to life.

No native English-speaking students attend the International High School, and more than twenty-eight languages fill the halls. The students in this modern-day Babel apply to college, fall in love, and rebel against their families like normal teenagers, but many 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. Hauser's unforgettable portraits of these charismatic young people, many undocumented, who came to America to seek better lives, include Jessica, kicked out of her father's home just days after arriving from China; Abdul, a diamond miner's son from Sierra Leone whose arrival in NYC is shrouded in mystery; Ngawang, who spent twenty-four hours in a suitcase to escape from Tibet; and Burmese refugee Chit Su, a new freshman who is the only person in the entire school who speaks her language.

An absolutely riveting human drama, The New Kids shows the rich, multi-hued face of America through the lives of memorably great characters in a story that will have readers laughing, crying, and cheering for them long after finishing the book.