New Kid
By Jerry Craft
Book Cover:
Category: Coretta Scott King Winner
Format: eBook
Target Age: ages 9-12 , grades 3-7.
Summary: Jordan is in seventh grade and really wants to attend art school. His parents enroll him in a very prestigious academic school instead. He is one of the few students of color in the whole school. Every day he makes the long journey from his home in Washington Heights to Riverdale. He is caught between two very different worlds and doesn't feel like he fits in to either one.
Justification: This graphic novel has a whole list of accolades and awards. It was the winner of the 2020 Newbery Medal, the winner of the 2020 Coretta Scott King Book Award among many others.
Review: This review will examine the plot, the appeal to an older audience, the illustrations and my experience reading this book digitally.
This book follows Jordan, a 7th grade person of color who is starting a new school. The school is a prestigious private school with a focus in academics. He is one of only a handful of students that are not white. Through the course of the story, he tries to fit in to a world that treats him like the other. Classmates and teachers treat them like the "other" not bothering to remember their names and making racists comments. They do this without even thinking about it or realizing that something is wrong with their behavior. This makes the reader more aware of their own words and interactions that they may have with people who may be different from themselves.
While the novel is written for grades 3-7, anyone 9+ can read and enjoy this book. The content is applicable to people of all ages. The feelings of not fitting in, or how we interact with people who are not exactly like us are concepts that even adults can relate to and learn from. The chapter titles are witty plays on older pop culture references. For example "War of Art", "The Hungry Games: Stop Mocking J" and perhaps my favorite, "The Socky Horror Picture Show" (Craft, J. 2020). This keeps even older audiences smirking and engaged.
The illustrations are kind of busy and at times hard to follow. The main character is a budding graphic artist himself and the book shifts from panes of the graphic novel to panes of Jordan's sketches. While they do switch from all in color to black and white, it does make some of the pages busy. There is also a lot of dialogue present with multiple speech bubbles for the same person in the same pane which leads to confusion on the order to read them at times. The panes also overlap at times, with one pane blending into the next without clear separation. This also makes the action harder to follow.
I read this on my kindle app. It was the first time I've read a graphic novel that way. You can activate comic cinema and it focuses pane by pane and has cinematic changes from pane to pane as you flip through. This was actually really cool. It made this particular novel slightly easier to follow, because only one pane was showing at a time. You can turn this feature off and just read it page by page as well. I also appreciated that this book was available through kindle unlimited. This allows more people to have access to the book without having to pay for it individually. If you choose to read this book, I would recommend using this cinematic comic feature and reading it digitally.
Overall I give this book a 3.5 stars. The message was good and the characters were relatable but the format was just not one I connect with.
Resources
Craft, J. (2020). New Kid [eBook edition]. Quill Tree Books.
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