By Jerry Craft
A funny, warm graphic novel about a Black seventh-grader who loves drawing cartoons and gets sent to a fancy, mostly-white private school where he fits neither his old neighborhood nor his new classroom.
Jordan Banks is twelve, lives in Washington Heights, and wants to go to art school. His parents send him across town instead, to Riverdale Academy, a posh private school where he's one of only a few Black students. So his days become a constant switch: too fancy for his old block, too different at his new school. The small slights add up. A teacher keeps calling him by the other Black boy's name. A well-meaning classmate says things that land wrong. Jordan draws all of it in his sketchbook, and those cartoons carry a lot of the book's honesty and most of its jokes.
Jerry Craft won the Newbery for this, the first graphic novel ever to take the medal, and it earns it because Jordan is such good company. A child who swears they don't like reading may be 250 pages in before they notice, because the humor pulls them along and the harder moments slip in without any fanfare. Craft doesn't lecture. He just hands you a day in Jordan's life, where nothing big happens and plenty quietly stings, and by the end your child may have felt, from the inside, what it's like to be the only one who looks like you in a room. It's the book I'd reach for first with a reluctant reader.