Seventeen-year-old Rania is shaken awake in her family’s apartment in Brooklyn. ICE is at the door, taking her mother away. But Ammi has
This was supposed to be Rania’s greatest summer: hanging out with her best friend, Fatima, and getting ready for college in the fall.
But it’s 2019, and nothing is certain.
Now, along with her younger brother, Kamal, and a new friend, Carlos, Rania must figure out how to survive. A road trip leads to searching for answers to questions she didn’t even think to ask.
In this vivid exploration of what happens when the country you have put your hopes into is fast shutting down, award-winning author Marina Budhos shows us how one girl bursting with dreams navigates secrets, love, and the lure of the open road.
Author
Marina Budhos
Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. Her newest novel, Watched, takes on surveillance in our post 9/11 world and is a 2017 Walter Award Honor and an Asian-Pacific American Award in Literature Honor. Watched is a companion book to Ask Me No Questions, which was an ALA Best Books and Notable, winner of the first James Cook Teen Book Award, and her YA novel Tell Us We’re Home is a 2017 Essex County Big Read YA pick. In spring 2017, Budhos also published Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro & The Invention of Modern Photojournalism, co-authored with her husband Marc Aronson. Their previous book, Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science, was a 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist. Budhos’s other books include The Professor of Light, House of Waiting, and a nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers. Her short work has appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Awl, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Marie Claire, Redbook, and in numerous anthologies. Ms. Budhos has received an EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award), a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, and has twice received a Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to India, given talks throughout the country and abroad, and is currently a professor of English at William Paterson University.
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