Adults immigrate for myriad reasons, and often with gains for future generations in mind. But from a child’s perspective, immediate losses dominate. “All these choices are made for us—as refugees, as immigrants—by our parents, by outside sources,” says filmmaker Maham Khwaja, who immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan with her family at age six. “Imagination is all you really have as a kid, and that’s what you use to help yourself understand the world, and also understand yourself.”
To appreciate how different age groups make sense of the short- and long-term impacts of immigration, PW spoke with eight authors of forthcoming children’s books, several prompted by personal experiences.
Picture books and home
In Khwaja’s debut picture book, The Home We Make (Lee & Low, Oct.), illustrated by Daby Zainab Faidhi, a young narrator fleeing with her parents from a war zone draws on her imagination to establish a sense of security. Crossing a rubble-strewn landscape to reach the seashore, the family shelters under a dock, where the narrator has an idea: “I find a stick and draw a house in the sand around Baba and Mama to keep them safe.” Khwaja says she wrote that scene to emphasize that “to have agency as a child, to understand your emotions and to self-soothe,” is resilience. The moment was fiction, “but it’s all rooted in these very pure, real feelings and events that occurred in real life.”
Author-illustrator Anna Desnitskaya left Moscow for a weeklong vacation with her children in February 2022. When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine the day that they were due to leave Cyprus, she realized they would not be going home again. A Star Shines Through (Eerdmans, Aug.) relates Desnitskaya’s experience through the eyes of a child who settles with their mother into a sparse apartment in a strange city. Memories of a star-shaped cardboard lamp, visible from afar in a window of their old home, sharpen the loss, until together they craft a new one.
Desnitskaya says she centered the lamp—a feature of her own home—“to tell complex stories through the mundane, simplest things.” She maintains that simplicity in her depiction of war, drawing “an approaching, terrifying black cloud and thickening darkness.” This visual representation of a feeling that she says “has haunted me for the past few years” renders the sense of foreboding appropriate for young readers.
Second and subsequent generations often look back to their immigrant forebears with appreciation burnished by distance. Like Clara, the protagonist of In the Groves (Penguin Workshop, Sept.), debut author-illustrator Andrea Cruz Floren grew up in the Midwest and looked forward to her visits with her Mexican American relatives in California. In the story, Clara wants to see the family orange groves she’s heard so much about, and when she’s told they’re no place for a visitor, she bristles—“A visitor is a tourist, a stranger. I’m familia!”—and sneaks in.
Striking the right narrative tone was tricky for the author: the groves are the result of hard immigrant labor, but they also represent optimism, she says: “The book was a way to reclaim that we’re proud of who we are, what we went through, and what we’ve overcome.”
Middle grade graphic novels and identity
An uncertain sense of self defines middle grade protagonists, and a dual-culture upbringing complicates the situation. When Ruth Chan was 13, her family’s relocation from Toronto to Hong Kong upended her life. She revisits the experience in her graphic memoir debut, Uprooted (Roaring Brook, Sept.), which received a starred review from PW. In Canada, Ruth was always seen as Chinese, but in Hong Kong, reunited with family, she’s not Chinese enough. As she navigates two cultures, Ruth faces an age-old struggle: bridging the divide.
“Some things might never be understood by the other party,” Chan says. “To me, a sense of vulnerability, and an openness to difference and learning about those things, can bring connection. One thing I’ve learned from making this book—storytelling and sharing family history is so important in bringing family members together.”
Graphic novelist Jose Pimienta likewise straddles two cultures: they have dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship and grew up in a border town. “Politics that are usually seen as mundane play on a larger scale for us,” they note, and this theme dominates Halfway to Somewhere (RH Graphic, Feb. 2025). Twelve-year-old Ave, their brother Ramón, and mother Joss—all with birthright citizen-
ship—move to Lawrence, Kans., from Mexicali, Mexico, leaving behind their father and sister Cruz, who have Mexican passports.
The separation turns the political acutely personal, Pimienta says. “Growing up and being exposed to the complexities of ethnicity, cultural identity, geopolitics—I don’t think that that’s easy for anybody, let alone a child.”
YA and generational perspectives
Three stylistically different narratives covering past, present, and future illuminate the legacy of immigration. Google engineer and poet Freeman Ng grew up in the Bay Area and knew the history of San Francisco’s Angel Island, where Chinese immigrants were detained under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, but he had never visited. When Ng came across poems written by those prisoners on the walls of their barracks, he says, “that was what really inspired me—poetry as the vehicle to express states of being.” His forthcoming novel-in-verse, Bridge Across the Sky (Atheneum, Aug.), opens in 1924 with a teenager immigrating with his father and grandfather. He calls himself Lee Yip Jing but admits it’s a “paper story” meant to fool the white authorities while the family is in detention.
Ng wants readers to understand “that these strange foreign characters were just ordinary people who eventually became Americans and turned out to be valuable parts of American society,” he says. “They’re here because we opened our doors to them.” PW’s starred review said that Ng “examines the history of white imperialism and racism through lyrical and introspective verse, while conversational dialogue fosters intimacy and immediacy with contemporary readers.”
National Book Award finalist Randy Ribay’s Everything We Never Had (Kokila, Aug.) “examines masculinity and familial trauma via four generations of Filipino teens’ alternating perspectives,” according to PW’s starred review. Racism and resistance to parental pressure take root in 1929 California when 16-year-old Francisco Maghabol regrets immigrating to Watsonville. The resulting father-son conflicts culminate in the present day as Francisco’s son Emil, now a grandfather, moves into the home of his son Chris and grandson Enzo at the start of the pandemic.
Ribay, who was born in the Philippines and raised in the Midwest, has noticed a recurring pattern in immigrant families from formerly colonized nations: “The first generation tries to assimilate. The second pushes back against that,” and later generations seek to reclaim their heritage. “Parents try to do the best that they can for their child, and the child tries to do the same, but every generation grows up under different conditions. The world is always changing.”
The one constant, says Gloria Muñoz, poet laureate of St. Petersburg, Fla.: “Immigrants have yet to be fully treated as worthy human beings in this country.” At the same time, she notes, climate change is disproportionately impacting people of color. Her debut prose-and-verse novel for teens, This Is the Year (Holiday House, Jan. 2025), is set in a near future when the rich live inland, safe from the rising seas; the poor occupy the coast; and immigrating to space is the answer to global warming. Juli, a high school senior, applies to the New American Space Program hoping to work on the moon.
The glamor of space is a veneer, Muñoz says. “The program is intentionally set up to provide cheap labor, masked as an opportunity. Readers may be rooting for Juli, but they’ll likely start to ask questions.”
Muñoz says she writes YA because “young people have the capacity, prudence, and hope to enact change.” Like other authors PW spoke with, she sees the conversation between reader and writer as one of empathy, and aims to reach “any person, young or old, who is struggling with the state of our world and how to understand their place in it.”
Linda Lowen is a writer, editor, and theater reviewer living in Syracuse, N.Y., and a Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American.
