Eighty-eight percent of my students speak a language other than English at home, most read below grade level as they acquire English as a second or third language, and the vast majority are immigrants or children of immigrants. Back in August, the good folks at the Nerdy Book Club let me post a Top 10 list of middle grade titles that reflect the immigrant experience in the US.
Crossing the Wire by Will Hobbs. Without the money to pay coyote smugglers, he must make the dangerous journey on his own any way he can, by stowing away on trains and trucks, and enduring extreme heat and cold as he hikes across the Arizona desert. Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne and James Houston non-fiction. In , seven-year-old Jeanne Wakatsuki and her Japanese-American family were forced to leave their home and live at the Manzanar internment camp along with 10, other Japanese Americans.
Farewell to Manzanar is the true story of how Jeanne and her family survived the indignity of life behind barbed wire in their own country, the United States of America. The Good Braider by Terry Farish novel in verse. Viola must leave her beloved grandmother behind when she flees war-torn South Sudan with her mother and young brother.
After a dangerous journey that takes her from Sudan into a refugee camp in Cairo, Viola finally ends up in Portland, Maine, where her uncle lives. Eventually, Viola learns to braid the two cultures to create a third—her own. Common immigrant issue : The violence, starvation, and tragedy that Viola endures before coming to the US set her apart from her more carefree high school peers.
The fact that this novel is written in spare verse makes it more accessible to struggling readers. Good Enough by Paula Yoo. So many books about immigrant families are threaded with serious themes, but Good Enough adds a lightness and humor to which children of immigrants will likely relate.
