New Boy: A Powerful YA Novel of Isolation and Identity―The First African American Student at a 1950s Connecticut Boarding School

"It won't be easy," the narrator's cousin tells him referring to his attending a posh New England prep school, and it isn't. Rob, who has previously attended the public schools of his Southern hometown, struggles with issues of class and race at his new school. The odd thing, though, is that three quarters of these growth experiences take place OUT of school. The narrator is barely back at school before he's bouncing off again on vacation. So it is not really a story about the prep school life.Most of the racism and classism Rob encounters and struggles with occurs away from the school. Through his friendship with a Jewish student and their experiences in Harlem, he becomes aware of Malcolm X and the civil rights movement. Eventually, he and his friends back home form a sit-in, however the action is over in just a few pages, while the reader is reasonably expecting it to be the climax of the book.The narrator is smart and likeable, but the reader feels a distance; although the events that occur are by turns painful, exhilirating and disturbing, it is as if the author is holding us at arm's length.

Even if you've never wondered what it was like to move through life as a black american in the 1960s, Julian Houston's "New Boy" will open you up to those facts -- enough of them, anyway, to change your thinking on that subject. In this skillfully restrained story, which unfolds quickly and hangs onto you after you've put it down, Houston takes a simple idea (southern black boy at a 1960s New England prep school) and weaves an intricate quilt of characters and situations that places this story among the classics. Houston's even-keeled voice puts his readers at ease as we take in some unnerving details, particularly concerning our nation's bigoted south in the relatively near past. This is one of the best books I've read set inside a New England prep school and is probably the most finely-crafted book I've read on American racism from a black perspective. I recommend it strongly and hope for more from this terrific author.

too preachy

Great book! Good for anyone high school age and above!

Interesting read. Coming of age story set against a period or racial segregation and tumultuous social changes in America.Interesting perspective of racial integration in an all-white school. Compelling novel.

I would recommend this book to young and old alike. It opens ones eyes to the severe discrimination that African Americans endured in the south in the late 50's and on, and reveals that the prejudices were not as strong in the north. For example, in the south AA people were not allowed served at Woolworth's lunch counters, but in New York they were. It also reveals that racial prejudice and segregation is and was not only racial.

Great

This was a good book. It opened my eyes to things I never knew or thought about and I am now more knowledgeable.