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Welcome to the New World: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Paperback – September 3, 2020
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--- GUARDIAN GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR ---
--- OBSERVER GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE MONTH ---
THE GROUNDBREAKING GRAPHIC NOVEL
A story about ordinary people navigating a strange land, in even stranger times.
On the eve of the US elections, a Syrian family leave their world behind for a chance at the American dream. But as the first day of their new life dawns, they are greeted by the news of Donald Trump's victory. It's as if they arrived in one country, and woke up in another. What does that mean for their past, their future... their home?
Welcome to the New World began as a ground-breaking comic strip in the New York Times. Every week, the Aldabaan family's experiences would be retold as a cartoon strip - keeping step as events unfolded in real life. One Pulitzer Prize later, this stunning graphic novel fills in the gaps, gradually revealing an America which is full of contradictions: foreign yet familiar, ignorant but kind, cruel yet generous. It's also an intimate portrait of family dynamics and everyday fortitude, from the first day at a new school to getting a new job (any job!) against the clock. It seems that if you can't turn back, the only way to go is onwards.
- Print length184 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
- Publication dateSeptember 3, 2020
- Dimensions6.97 x 0.94 x 9.21 inches
- ISBN-101526623765
- ISBN-13978-1526623768
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Product details
- Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing; 1st edition (September 3, 2020)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 184 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1526623765
- ISBN-13 : 978-1526623768
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.97 x 0.94 x 9.21 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,133,844 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,730 in Biographies & History Graphic Novels
- #5,005 in Literary Graphic Novels (Books)
- #210,887 in Social Sciences (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
When I was twenty years old, I took some time off from college and moved to Prague. It was the sort of inspired, half-baked decision that you can only make when you are twenty and clueless. A few weeks into my stay in Prague, I found an apartment and settled into a routine of doing very little ' wandering around the city, reading, and living off the money I'd saved. Almost immediately I sensed that it was a special time to be living there. This was back in 1995, and the city was teaming with artists, expatriates and lingering tourists, living in two-dollar-a-night hostels. Everyone there was writing a novel, or a play, or at least some essays. The apartment that I took over ' a drafty subterranean vault beneath a neighborhood pub ' had been the home of a long string of expatriated Americans before me, and the closets were filled with an array of dusty, discarded and abandoned manuscripts, most of them uncompleted.
Eventually, I got swept up in the bohemian spirit of it all and set to work on piece of writing of my own, a screenplay to be precise. The screenplay, which was called the Papaya Trap, was about a con artist who falls in love with a beautiful one-armed girl.
The truly transformative event of my time in Prague, however, was my decision to investigate my family's roots in this part of the world. I knew that some of my ancestors had once lived in Prague, and on a whim I telephoned my great-uncle (Joe Garray) in America, and asked him if we had any relatives who were still here. "No they all perished in the holocaust," he said. But I kept pushing him and eventually he told me that the man who saved him from the Germans still lived in a farm house in Slovakia at the edge of the Tatra Mountains. A week later I took a commuter plane to Bratislava and then a train to the small town where this man lived.
I showed up at his door after sundown and he came to the gate cautiously, leaning heavily on a wooden cane, face trembling and bald except for a few long loops of white hairs, his feet engulfed in a swarm of mutts who guarded his every step. After trying to explain who I was for almost five minutes, he led me through the back door and into his kitchen. It was bare room, illuminated in dingy fluorescent light, occupied only by a few stools, a couch covered in dog hairs, and a hissing radiator. Here he told me about hiding my uncle and their numerous close calls with the Slovak Gestapo. When the situation at the farmhouse became too heated, they fled to the mountains in the cold of winter and lived like hermits for six months. More than anything else this story convinced me that I wanted to dedicate my life to becoming a professional storyteller.
After college, I landed an internship at The New Republic. My chief responsibility at the magazine was researching and fact-checking. I spent hours, days, and weeks looking for correct spellings and exact dates. Being a quick fact-checker was always a point of pride among the office grunts like myself, and though it was an obscure and largely useless skill, I found it quite helpful in tracking down information on dangerous and outlandish towns. On my lunch breaks and in between assignments I searched for clues, and gradually I found them ' reports of holdouts living on lava fields, windswept sandbars, and desolate arctic glaciers. I spent Sunday afternoons combing the web with a smattering of search terms like 'squatter,' 'won't leave home,' and 'people call him crazy.' I became friendly with the press office at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and I pumped them for ideas. It turned into something of a hobby.
Eventually, the short magazine pieces that I wrote on people and their homes attracted the interest of a literary agent who convinced me to write a book, which I then did. This book ' Braving Home (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) ' allowed me to quit my job and become a fulltime, self-employed writer.
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Top reviews from the United States
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I liked it's easy for whose learning english
It infuriates me to no end that the United States has been sold as this all inclusive resort package that accepts people from all creeds. That is an absolute lie and is exactly what plays out in this poignant graphic novel. There’s a scene where the son Naji has these grandiose dreams of what it must be like to be a child raised in the US where you’re surrounded by lavishness and not leaving in an actual war zone. However, when Naji arrives in the US, how he is treated and what he experiences makes his miss Syria even more despite the constant turmoil he was subjected to. This resonated with me as a reader because it is ludicrous that the bigotry and xenophobia in this country makes refugees miss literal war zones.
There are a lot of heartbreaking scenes in this book. The sacrifices that each of the family members must make in order to pursue a better life will tear at your insides. But even though there’s so many roadblocks in front of the Aldabaans, they refuse to give up on each other and doing whatever it takes to build a better future. Their hope and dreams were infectious.
Thank you Henry Holt & Co. for providing a review copy. This did not influence my review. All opinions are my own.
This graphic account of the human experience is well crafted and timely. It would be a good addition to a high school or young adult library to teach kindness, empathy, and perspective taking. Adults will benefit from reading it, as well, to reflect on current events and current political attitudes.
Top reviews from other countries
Here, the family came from Jordan and they were grateful for the house they were provided. But they have to become self-independent in 4 months, which isn't a simple task because they have to do low-level jobs; as professional ones require full background information and it is tedious to get those documents within a few months of one's arrival. For children, it is even tougher as they want to blend in, but not everyone is empathetic. The book shows how you long for your place and people, who you have left behind, the loss of your dreams and the fear of the unknown in a new country.
I enjoyed the pictures as it creates an image and makes it even easier to relate to the subject and characters. If you want to know more about the life of a refugee, read the book.
Although the book was published in 2020, it appears to have been written before the 2020 US election. Had Trump won then the message would have been even more ominous but now seems to have the space to be much more optimistic with the US leadership in the process of changing.
There isn't much time to get to know the characters in a graphic novel so they are introduced immediately. The reader is treated with respect and expected to make some assumptions about the family with lots of information being given within just a few pages.
The drawings are very clever. Simple and very expressive, it's amazing how much can be understood by facial expressions.
The author works well with the two languages, easily flipping between and never shying away from communication problems. It is particularly clever how conversations are illustrated with dialogue being taken in small chunks and the characters taking turns on the same pane.
It is useful that we get to see thoughts as well as speech in order to more understand how the refugees, and those helping them, feel.
Hope and despair are shown to be hand in hand, each coming in waves, effecting the individuals in many different ways.
The greatest part of this story is that it is true and is wrapped into a large project to help refugees entering the US. Their story is told without holding back on the detail and, at all times, the families are treated with respect and dignity. There is never any temptation to exploit the story for dramatic effect which is pleasing to see.