2 quarter outside reading book review

New Boy by Julian Houston. Houghton Mifflin Books, 2005. Genre: Historical Fiction.

New Boy is about segregation and racism during the late 1950's in Virginia. The protagonist, Rob Garrett, is a fifteen-year-old boy who is enrolled by his parents into a private school called Draper in Connecticut. Few kids in his town have the special opportunity to get the education he is. In fact, he is the first and only African American student there and he overcomes many obstacles while students try to put segregation to an end in his hometown in Virginia.
"He looked at my ticket and then returned it to me. 'You know, when we get to Washington,'he said in a confidential tone, 'you'll have to move to the back of the train."
Rob Garret has always been dealing with segregation and racism and he is tired of it. When he comes back to his home town from his schooling in Connecticut, he attends meetings where many of his former classmates organize a sit-in at a lunch counter where blacks are not allowed. The entire book is in Rob's point of view and you experience what it is like to live in a southern state in the late 1950's.
"The first thing we saw was Albert, and then another student, seated on stools with their backs to us, lying face-down on the blood spattered lunch counter."
I really enjoyed this book and think that it sent out a good message about racism and treating people differently because of what they look like in general. I learned about how the blacks were treated during the 1950's and what they had to go through in order to accomplish simple things because of segregation.