Showing titles in Emigration & Immigration

Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life. Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion.

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers - especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, whom her family can never know about.

Sixteen-year-old Ana is a poet and a lover of language. Except that since she moved to New Jersey from Argentina, she can barely find the words to express how she feels. At first Ana just wants to return home. Then she meets Harrison, the very cute, very American boy in her math class, and discovers the universal language of racing hearts. But when she begins to spend time with Neo, the Greek Cypriot boy from ESL, Ana wonders how figuring out what her heart wants can be even more confusing than the grammar they’re both trying to master.

Four months ago, Sara Zapata's best friend disappeared, kidnapped by the web of criminals who terrorize Juarez. Four hours ago, Sara received a death threat - and, with it, a clue to the place where her friend is locked away. Four weeks ago, Emiliano Zapata fell in love with Perla Rubi, who will never be his so long as he's poor. Four minutes ago, Emiliano got the chance to make more money than he ever dreamed - just by joining the web.

Thanks to a tiny transgression after school one day, Melody is shocked to discover that her parents have decided to move her and her mom out of New York City to join her father in Seoul—immediately! Barely having had the chance to say goodbye to her best friend before she's on a plane, Melody is resentful and homesick. But she soon finds herself settling into their super-luxe villa, meeting cool friends at school, and discovering the alluring aspects of living in Korea. Life in Seoul is amazing, until cracks begin to form on its glittering surface....

For seventeen-year-old Maya, trashion is her passion, and her talent for making clothing out of unusual objects landed her a scholarship to Guatemala City’s most prestigious art school and a finalist spot in the school’s fashion show. Mamá is her biggest supporter, taking on extra jobs to pay for what the scholarship doesn’t cover, and she might be even more excited than Maya about what the fashion show could do for her future career. So when Mamá doesn’t come to the show, Maya doesn’t know what to think. But the truth is worse than she could have imagined.

We meet 16-year-old Vali on the eve of a raid of her small Vermont town that sends her, her mother, and her younger brother on the run from the Deportation Forces. In this near-future America, all citizens are chipped at birth and this chip is used to track their movements from bus stops to schools to grocery stores. Vali and her mother are undocumented, but at least Vali has a counterfeit chip—until it starts malfunctioning. Now on the run, Vali and her family are desperately trying to make it to California, a sanctuary state that is being walled off from the rest of the country.

Seventeen-year-old Marisol has always dreamed of being American, learning what Americans and the US are like from television and Mrs. Rosen, an elderly expat who had employed Marisol's mother as a maid. She never pictured fleeing her home in El Salvador under threat of death and stealing across the US border as "an illegal", or getting caught. So she's asked to become a grief keeper, taking the grief of another into her own body to save a life. It's a risky, experimental study, but if it means Marisol can keep her sister safe, she will risk anything.

Now she’s seventeen, and she needs to figure out a way to stay in New York City, the only home she can remember. There’s only one possibility that will get her a green card quickly enough: Jimena is going to find an American to marry her. She’s got one excellent candidate: Vitaly, her next-door neighbor and friend, the only person she trusts with her secret. But Vitaly’s got his own plans for the future. He’s a definite no.

Michael usually concerns himself with basketball and hanging out with his friends, but every once in a while, his parents drag him to meetings and rallies with their anti-immigrant group. And it all makes sense to Michael. Until Mina, a beautiful girl from the other side of the protest lines, shows up at his school and turns out to be funny, smart - and a Muslim refugee from Afghanistan. Suddenly his parents' politics seem much more complicated.

From a grandmother worried that her children are losing their Indian identity, to a daughter wrapped up in a forbidden biracial love affair, to a granddaughter social activist fighting to preserve Bengali tigers, Perkins weaves together the threads of a family growing into an American identity. Here is a sweeping story of five women at once intimately relatable and yet entirely new.

Since emigrating from Bangladesh, 14-year-old Nadira and her family have been living in New York City on expired visas, hoping to realize their dream of becoming legal U.S. citizens. But after 9/11, everything changes. Suddenly being Muslim means you are dangerous - a suspected terrorist. When Nadira's father is arrested and detained at the U.S.-Canadian border, Nadira and her older sister, Aisha, are told to carry on as if everything is the same. The teachers at Flushing High don't ask any questions, but Aisha falls apart....

Mateo Garcia and his younger sister, Sophie, have been taught to fear one word for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico has started to fade. Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they're hard workers and good neighbors. When Mateo returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken by ICE, he realizes that his family's worst nightmare has become a reality.

In the final days of the Việt Nam War, Hằng takes her little brother, Linh, to the airport, determined to find a way to safety in America. In a split second, Linh is ripped from her arms - and Hằng is left behind in the war-torn country. Six years later, Hằng has made the brutal journey from Việt Nam and is now in Texas as a refugee. She doesn’t know how she will find the little brother who was taken from her until she meets LeeRoy, a city boy with big rodeo dreams, who decides to help her.

When Danny discovers a taped-up box in his father's closet filled with old letters and a file on a powerful Silicon Valley family, he realizes there's much more to his family's past than he ever imagined. Danny has been an artist for as long as he can remember, and it seems his path is set, with a scholarship to RISD and his family's blessing to pursue the career he's always dreamed of. Still, contemplating a future without his best friend, Harry Wong, by his side makes Danny feel a panic he can barely put into words.

Seventeen-year-old Evan Panos doesn't know where he fits in. His strict immigrant Greek mother refuses to see him as anything but a disappointment. His quiet, workaholic father is a staunch believer in avoiding any kind of conflict. And his best friend, Henry, has somehow become distractingly attractive over the summer.

The year is 1910, and the working conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are deplorable. Bella, Yetta, and Jane all become passionately involved in a workers' strike: then bear witness to a catastrophic fire that changes everything.

This is the story of Anita de la Torre, a 12-year-old girl living in the Dominican Republic in 1960. Most of her relatives have immigrated to the United States, her Tio Toni has disappeared, Papi has been getting mysterious phone calls about butterflies, and someone named Mr. Smith and the secret police have started terrorizing her family. While Anita deals with this frightening series of events, she also struggles with her adolescence and her own personal fight to be free.

Pulga has his dreams. Chico has his grief. Pequeña has her pride. And these three teens have one another. But none of them have illusions about the town they've grown up in. Even with the love of family, threats lurk around every corner. And when those threats become all too real, the trio knows they have no choice but to run: from their country, from their families, from their beloved home. Crossing from Guatemala through Mexico, they follow the route of La Bestia, the perilous train system that might deliver them to a better life - if they are lucky enough to survive the journey.

They’re called parachutes: teenagers dropped off to live in private homes and study in the United States while their wealthy parents remain in Asia. Claire Wang never thought she’d be one of them, until her parents pluck her from her privileged life in Shanghai and enroll her at a high school in California. Suddenly she finds herself living in a stranger’s house, with no one to tell her what to do for the first time in her life. She soon embraces her newfound freedom, especially when the hottest and most eligible parachute, Jay, asks her out.