New Kid
Jerry Craft (2019)
“A seventh-grader learns to survive a mostly-white private school without losing who he is — and draws his way through it.”
At a Glance
Jordan Banks is a twelve-year-old Black kid from Washington Heights who loves drawing comics but gets sent to Riverdale Academy Day School — a prestigious, mostly-white private school — instead of the art school he actually wants to attend. Jordan spends the year navigating microaggressions, class differences, a teacher who can't learn his name, and the impossible pressure to be two different people in two different worlds. By the end, he finds a way to belong in both without erasing either.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
New Kid is the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal (2020) — one of the most prestigious awards in children's literature, whose selection committee has historically favored text-only prose. The award was a formal acknowledgment that visual storytelling is literature, and that the graphic novel form can carry serious thematic weight. The win changed the conversation about what counts as a 'real book' in school curricula.
Diction Profile
Informal in voice, formally composed in image — everyday middle-school dialogue elevated by precise visual storytelling
Low in text, very high in image