Education, CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge
I have wanted to read all of the Street Noise (the publishers) graphic novels (they only do graphic novels, so that’s redundant…). Anyways, I have wanted to read Unaccompanied: Stories of Brave Teenagers Seeking Asylum by Tracy White since I learned it was going to be published. But something always got in the way of actually reading. I figured maybe it wasn’t something I was going to read, but that was okay. I mean you can’t read them all….
Then one day I found that the online reader copy I had was still active. The book is from 2023 or so, but still this link was available for reading. And during a few lunches I read White’s book. Well, I skipped their introduction and closing statements, but that was only because I didn’t want it to cloud my personal feelings of what I was going to experience/what I had experienced. Knowing that the story was about teens and asylum seekers was already shaping my opinions as it was. You can’t hear this subject and not think about something (and honestly, it doesn’t have to be positive, though it probably should be, but current events do show us otherwise).
One will read emotional stories about five different teenagers seeking asylum in the US. They are from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guinea. We see the troubles in their countries (gangs, abuse, poverty, rape, incest, forced marriages and more) and how they try and make it to the states. Where they only have more hurdles and sometimes have unimaginable results. Needless to say, there are A LOT of triggers. While they don’t show the rapes, there is no question it has happened. They do not show the violence (of gangs and the escape routes) but there is no question that people were injured and killed. 
The illustrations are not to scale and I’m assuming will be black and white in the finished copies. However, even though they are a main source of our information they can be awkward at times. I think you just need to set aside personal likes and dislikes and just go for it. There is also a lot of text and that can make things crowded. And sometimes confusing as they are not just giving the story, but also telling you information about the people, places and organizations that we are experiencing (the before, during and after the teens find themselves in the states and the process). Therefore we are getting an education of what the system is like as well as the the stories why someone would willingly put themselves through the struggle.
