New Kid

Jordan Banks would rather draw comics than do almost anything else, but his parents enroll him at Riverdale Academy Day School, a prestigious, mostly white private school far from his own Washington Heights neighborhood, and this graphic novel follows his seventh grade year adjusting to a world that does not quite know what to do with him. Teachers repeatedly mix up the names of the school's few Black students, classmates assume he must be there on a sports scholarship, and Jordan sketches his own private comics throughout the book as a way of processing microaggressions the adults around him mostly do not notice they are committing. He becomes close with Drew, another Black student navigating the same environment with more open frustration, and with Liam, a wealthy white classmate who means well and still gets things wrong, and Craft lets all three relationships stay genuinely complicated rather than resolving into easy lessons. By the end of the year Jordan has made real friends, seen his own artwork chosen for the yearbook cover, and worn pink shorts to school on the last day without the dread that would have stopped him in September, small victories that read as large ones given how the year began; Drew, despite strong grades, still is not sure he wants to come back, a note the book leaves unresolved rather than tied up neatly. Jordan spends the summer reconnecting with his old neighborhood friends, caught between two worlds that do not talk to each other.

Craft draws in warm, expressive, cartoon forward art that carries a lot of the book's humor even in its hardest moments, and the graphic novel format moves fast, readable in a single sitting while still layering in real specificity about code switching and the small daily calculations Jordan has to make that his white classmates never have to think about. It suits readers new to graphic novels as easily as devoted fans of the format, and its refusal to let every relationship end tidily is part of what critics have praised and part of what has drawn attacks from adults who never read past the cover.