New Kid Response

            Jerry Craft’s New Kid has to be one of my favorite books we have read this semester—a descriptor I’ve handed out in the past, but this book runs away with the title due to its monumental achievement of making me laugh out loud, in real life, multiple times. Craft is able to convey so many nuances of the deeply problematic world of private school (speaking from experience) through the eyes of Jordan, whose narration is straight-to-the-point, funny, and true. The graphic novel medium offers so much opportunity for comedy, utilizing visual cues typically unavailable to a comedic novelist. For instance, early on in the story, as Jordan is just beginning to get a feel for his new school, he smiles at the sight of a Black man behind a steering wheel as he stands in a sea of white kids. This smile vanishes, accompanied by a cartoon frowny face, when the driver opens the car door to reveal a white student exiting the car, and Jordan’s character winces—the man is employed by a wealthy white family, an uncomfortable reminder of the economic and racial tensions at play over the course of the story, obvious to Jordan where many of the teachers he encounters insist otherwise. Jordan and his classmate are driven home by another Black chauffeur later that day, and while the two boys are young, Liam is still able to sense that something about the situation feels wrong, referring to the man as a “friend of the family” rather than a driver.

            New Kid also shone in its allusions and references to pop culture, which I realize I am biased in saying as a massive movie nut. I thought the various chapter titles were hilarious, each two-page spread depicting an event that takes place in the chapter fused with the poster of a popular movie and a thematically altered title, with such hits as a frustrated Jordan holding a bottle of ketchup subtitled “The Hungry Games: Stop Mocking J,” and an impressively accurate recreation of the poster for The Force Awakens—or, rather, “The Farce Awakens,” Kylo Ren’s lightsaber having been substituted for a glowing red ruler. Though our experiences are quite different, I saw a lot of myself in Jordan, as someone who makes sense of the world around me through the lens of movies and television. I was excited to see Jordan compare himself to Batman and Bruce Wayne in his moving between two worlds, a thought process that I have used for years. While the two worlds we inhabit are not the same—Jordan’s being his mostly Black neighborhood and his mostly white school, and mine being one city where I present femininely and the other masculinely—I evidently thought that the Batman story was very apt to describe the sensation of feeling pulled in two different directions, especially as it might be rationalized by a middle schooler. Overall, I found New Kid to be a delightful read and I can’t wait to talk about it in class.