Unaccompanied
Stories of Brave Teenagers Seeking Asylum
One of the 2024 Best Graphic Novels for Teens by the American Library Association
Life at home is so unbearable that these kids will risk their lives and face colossal challenges to escape to the United States and find safety.
This book tells the true stories of five brave teens fleeing their home countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guinea, on their own, traveling through unknown and unfriendly places, and ultimately crossing into the US to find refuge and seek asylum. Based on extensive interviews with teen refugees, lawyers, caseworkers, and activists, Tracy White shines a light on five individual kids from among the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who enter the US each year. In stark black and white illustrations, she helps us understand why some young people would literally risk their lives to seek safety in the US. Each one of them has been backed into a corner where emigration to the US seems like their only hope.
Tracy White makes comics for young adults. Her autobiographical series TRACED was twice nominated for a best web comic Ignatz award, and became a TV series for Oxygen. Her book How I Made it to Eighteen: A Mostly True Story was on YALSA's Great Graphic Novels for Teens list, a Texas Maverick Graphic Novel, and a Bank Street Best Book of the Year. She currently teaches comics at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
