Under any circumstances, middle school seems to be a time of figuring out who you really are. However, if you leave a Washington Heights apartment to travel across town to the academically upscale Riverdale Academy Day School as the “new kid” with only a smattering of kids of color in the whole grade, the ante has already been elevated. Jordan Banks, already a seventh-grade cartoonist, really wants to go to art school, but his mother sees the advantages of five languages, AP classes, and specialized sports. His father, not quite as convinced, supports his art talent and notices the lack of student diversity in the school brochure.
New Kid, the graphic novel by Jerry Craft that won the Newbery Award was our de Grummond Book Group selection this month and would be a perfect selection for a reluctant middle grade reader – or an avid one, for that matter. It has all the characters that belong in a middle school, noticeably, the standard bully, the teacher who can’t remember a kid’s name, and the girl with an affectation. Yet each of them manages to be more than a cookie-cutter character.
Our de Grummond Book Group brings different strengths to our discussions. One retired librarian commented that she had read the book in the normal manner as a graphic novel and then gone back to read just the text to see if it held up to Newbery standards and found that it did. Another member with a background of teaching music and the arts called our attention to how much was told in the drawings, pointing out one particular page where three spreads tell a whole story by itself as Jordan struggles to find space on the bus as he makes his way across town.
Since all of our group reads critically, we enrich our own views of the book as we share our sometimes varied opinions. Our final verdict did come to an agreement that graphic novels and this one in particular are not a flash in the pan but belong in the body of literature, not just for reluctant readers but as a standard part of the list for all students.