The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens

Synopsis

Inspired by the author's widely acclaimed New York Times article, The New Kids 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.