Rating: 4 stars
Drew Ellis goes to the prestigious Riverdale Academy Day School, but unlike a lot of his more privileged classmates, he feels like he has to work way harder and he still might not get the same opportunities that they do. While a lot of his fellow students live in enormous mansions, Drew lives alone with his grandmother (who has to work almost constantly to provide for him). He also knows that no matter how good his grades are or which school he attends, most people are only going to see the colour of his skin. Of course, his friends Jordan and Liam have their own problems to deal with.
This is a companion novel to New Kid, which I haven't read. The good news is that you don't need to have read that book to enjoy this one, but I suspect I would have gotten even more out of this if I'd also read the first book in the series.
For our Cannonball Book Club in October, we continued last year's success of banned books, this time focusing on graphic novels. I had already read the other two we selected, This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki and Gender Queer by Maia Kokabe, so this was the only one left for me to read. Thankfully the Oslo public library had a copy, so I was able to read it before our online discussion and Zoom meeting.
This is very highly rated on Goodreads, and I liked it a lot. I'm very much not the intended target audience, and had I been younger, I might have rated it even higher. As always when we read banned books, I am utterly baffled as to why anyone would think this was a bad thing for young people to read. This shows a very nuanced portrayal of several young individuals from very different family backgrounds and how they all, even when they might seem to have no worries, might not have perfect lives. What a terrible thing for tweens to read, apparently.
Judging a book by its cover: Craft is an excellent artist, and shows inside the comic that he's capable of drawing in a number of styles. I really like the playful cover, with some of the characters being juggled, along with the demands and responsibilities Drew faces daily.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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