Follows the lives of twenty-two immigrant teenagers from nations devastated by drought or famine or war, over the course of their first school year in America. The talented and endlessly resourceful Denver South High School teacher Mr. Eddie Williams welcomes these students, who speak fourteen different languages but no English and are completely unfamiliar with American culture, to his specially created English Language Acquisition class. He guides...

You can't really tell what time it is when you're in the freezer. Every year, thousands of migrant children and teens cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The journey is treacherous and sometimes deadly, but worth the risk for migrants who are escaping gang violence and poverty in their home countries. And for those refugees who do succeed? They face an immigration process that is as winding and multi-tiered as the journey that brought them here. In this...

Alice is fifteen, with hair as red as fire and skin as pale as bone. Something inside Alice is broken: she remembers words but struggles to speak them. Still, Alice knows words are for sharing, so she pins them to posters in tucked-away places: railway waiting rooms, fish-and-chip shops, quiet corners. Manny is sixteen, with a scar from shoulder to elbow. Something inside Manny is broken: he was once a child soldier, forced to do terrible, violent...

"Welcome to the Arcadia. Once a luxurious cruise ship, it became a refugee camp after being driven from Europe by an apocalyptic war. Now it floats near the coastline of the Federated States -- a leftover piece of a fractured USA. For forty years, residents of the Arcadia have been prohibited from making landfall. It is a world of extreme haves and have-nots, gangs and make-shift shelters. Esther is a loyal citizen, working flat-out to have the rare...