American Street
by Ibi Zoboi
She came from Haiti. Her mother didn't make it through. Detroit is waiting.
For you if
you arrived somewhere new and found it was both everything you hoped and nothing like you expected
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
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Fabiola arrives from Haiti to Detroit to live with her aunt and three cousins — her mother detained at the border. Detroit is nothing like Port-au-Prince and everything like it simultaneously: the same hunger, the same hustle, the same spirits watching. Zoboi weaves Haitian Vodou into the fabric of the novel so naturally that the orishas are as real as the gangs and the cousins and the snow. A dispatch about what it means to arrive somewhere that is supposed to be better and find that better is more complicated than anyone told you. National Book Award finalist. One of the most formally original YA novels of the last decade.
Banned & challenged
Find out what they were so afraid of.
Get a copy and decide for yourself.
A Haitian-American teenager navigating Detroit's west side after her mother is detained by immigration. Challenged for drug use and violence. The real threat: a story that centers a Black immigrant girl's survival and makes the violence of both street life and immigration enforcement visible at once.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Haiti • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Haitian author
- Themes
- coming of ageimmigration
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