• Why Novels? A High School Story

    One High School.

    Ok, so there’s a lot to distract the world from reading novels.  Or even wondering why you would, when you could read a summary, or a nonfiction book on whatever the subject is. Why novels?

    In my role as a novel writer, I recently presented an assembly program speaking to students at Gorham High School, Maine.  Many had not read my novels but they came to hear a writer who often writes as a witness to the world and its people.  The title of my talk was “Writing as a Witness” and I wanted to bring them the world. 

    I’m influenced by and in love with the vision of I’m Your Neighbor Books, the Portland-based nonprofit that puts its trust in children’s books and novels to help readers meet newcomers in their communities. The IYNB vision is that we can meet people through story, what I hope my books help to do.  How are we different, or how are we the same.  IYNB features a collection of novels called Read to Belong, Read to Welcome.  In Gorham I wanted to bring some of these stories along with my own, and hear about books the students are reading. 

                In the assembly, I showed lots of pictures and read scenes set in Vietnam, South Sudan, Nepal, places I’ve been, or just on the border, and I’ve written about. We listened to clips of music that students could identify as a love song or a lullaby even if they didn’t know the language because characteristics of melodies are similar across cultures. I read from The Good Braider since that was a book students had read in multilingual learner classes and American studies.

    A girl in the second assembly, 11th and 12th graders, asked if there was something I learned from being in other countries, something I brought back home with me.  I loved the question and I was excited a YA novel could take her down that road, and I imagined her on her own hero’s journey, like she was going to discover something. She was exploring and imagining being in the world. I told her in Kenya, I never saw anyone throw anything away.  Everything is used over and over. I brought that home.

    The Librarian, Master Collaborator.

    The organizer of my week in Gorham was the high school librarian, Kelly Tibbetts. From her, I discovered there were other organizations she worked with to bring a focus to immigrant lit and welcoming newcomers. She met with a team of librarians from all the schools. The high school Civil Rights team was honoring the Day of Welcome, Because Our School Communities are for Everyone. It’s a state-wide project. Kelly said, “We piggybacked on the Civil Rights team project.” The Day is for welcoming immigrants and refugees, and also people with disabilities, and Native Americans, the area’s First People. I was amazed at so many groups working together to welcome. I’ll mention these to you as possible partners in your schools as you seek to support students’ understanding of the small extraordinary world they’re growing up in, and will work in. There’s the ILC, the Instructional Leadership Corps, a staff committee with a goal “to ensure that all students’ holidays are represented and that staff have the knowledge to support students who may be observing different religious practices.” Also, the faculty of the 10th grade English course, American Studies. They read literature about indigenous people, enslaved people, and immigrants including many recent newcomers from Asia and Africa.  Lori Littlefield, the Narragansett School librarian, whose students I also visited as well as all the Gorham Schools told me about a major collaborating partner, Aspire Gorham. It’s a “community-wide initiative of businesses and community organizations to connect students to professionals for career exposure.” The community of educators understand the novel is like alchemy. Novels play to our imaginations so that we can step into the experiences of others, and that students’ own reading opens the way to the power of writing.

    The Books .

    I asked Kelly to recommend some books she and her students loved and learned from about cultures new to them. Kelly’s students follow a lot of BookToc creators so that’s part of discoverability. The following are selected books on Kelly’s list and I’m Your Neighbor Books collection. Follow the links for information and resources about the books on the IYNB site. 

    All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir. All My Rage is a ferocious story about love and the impact of a family’s tragedy in Pakistan that brings a young boy, Salahuydin, to live in California’s Mojavi’s Desert.  All My Rage asks a lot of readers and yet Kelly’s students pass it around among themselves. Kelly describes it as a book about mental health, something students talk about and read about. Tahir portrays a tender bond between Salahydin and the girl he grows up with, Noon. The student readers are totally engaged in the lives of the teens in high school in the novel and in how they negotiate contemporary America’s prejudice and troubles with addiction in their town. Tahir is writing across humanity. When Noon and Salahudin first meet as children, Tahir writes, “they spoke a language of pain and memory.” Maybe that’s the human language readers respond to. They find themselves. 

     American Born Chinese. “Students constantly check this out,” Kelly says.  American Born Chinese is the now-classic 2007 graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. Yang captures what I hear from many nonwhite minority students about how they want to not be the other, not be the outsider. Gene Yang’s characters make it feel like a badge.

    A book I’d love to read with teens is Our Beautiful Darkness.  It’s by Ondjaki, an Angolan writer and is illustrated by the graphic novelist, António Jorge Gonçalves.  The book is an illustrated dialogue between two teens, set in the night in a blackout toward the end of the Angolan civil war. The pages are mostly black with streaks of the characters’ faces, eyes, feet lit by headlights and starlight.

    “Can star-wishes be said out loud?” the boy narrator asks.

    “Sure. Do you have one in mind?”

    “It’s a tricky one. I’d wish for a rainbow, even now.”

    “No one can draw a rainbow in a dark sky,” she said.

    “I think the angels that steal voices can…I want a

    rainbow dotted with lights, like a bridge at night.”

    “A bridge?”

     “To the other world. And back again. To call back

    those who left when it was still their time to be here.”

                The translator from the original Portuguese to English, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, writes an historical note to tell readers about the long war in Angola after the county’s war for independence from Portugal. The book is like a prayer to youth and youth’s hope.

    Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian is set in a nearby fictional Lewiston, Maine next door to Gorham. Students like seeing their part of Maine in a major novel.  

    A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi.  Shirin, the main character, brings us into her life as a Muslim-American in the U.S. one year after 9-11. She has always worn a hijab and does not that change that tradition. Pair her story as one more account with others of the impact on Americans of the 9-11 attack. The author, Mafi, is Iranian-American. She shows us an angry 16-year old Shirin, hardened by prejudice against her, who undergoes a fascinating, unraveling of her steely indifference when she falls in love and faces a new kind of vulnerability and moral responsibility to another. It’s also about having breakdancing to live for.

    When a Brown Girl Flees is by Aamna Qureshi. Kelly hopes to get her hands on this one since it’s popular and is always checked out.  Qureshi’s main character, Zahra, 18 years old, runs away from her devout, Muslim home in California where one of the few choices allowed by her traditional family when she graduates is to accept an arranged marriage. Students want to talk about how a person tries on different identities to be able to figure out their own and want to read novels with characters doing that, as Zahra does.

    Ernesto Cisneros’ character, Efrén, in Efrén Divided is younger than the 16-18-year olds in the previous books here. He’s twelve. He lives in the America of ICE check points, ICE helicopters, ICE raids at work places. To me, it felt like young Efrén was in James Baldwin’s living room in his 1950s short story “Sonny’s Blues” in which the adults speak in hushed voices about tragic injustices to Black relatives and old friends. Efrén is confused (My mother has never done anything wrong) but he feels the fear that surrounds his family, a tension that multilingual-learner teachers in Gorham told me their students express. When Efrén’s mother is arrested by ICE, it is he and his father who exchange fearful looks as they try not to frighten younger ones.  In a quick call, Efrén’s mom tells him, “I’m going to need you to take care of your brother and sister.”   Efrén Divided, carefully told, is a story to help young readers understand the experience of their classmates who’ve been separated by the U.S. government from their parents.  Efrén Divided is a Pura Belpré Award winner; the author is a middle school teacher in Santa Ana, California and he has a new book, Queso, Just in Time, coming in March, 2026. You’ll find many teaching-support materials on his site: Ernesto Cisneros

    The last thing the Gorham high school librarian tells me is, “We’ve created a space here where students are comfortable asking questions of newcomers. Students are comfortable meeting people from away.”  Kelly wants to build up the library’s collection of novels in the languages the new students speak including Portuguese, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish. They showed me how novels, with their deeply revealed characters as only novels can offer, their insistent voices, their ways of seeing, have become key to a school community’s sense of belonging and welcoming.

  • ‘Go Home’ Wins NH Literary Award

    Go Home, published by Groundwood Books, won the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Young Adult Literature. My co-writer, Lochan Sharma, is below with our book. Lochan and I have presented the book around the state. The last image is of a leaf print I made for Olive, my main character. She loves the forests in her town by the ocean. The story is told through the lens of teens in love and sorting out what friendship calls on them to do in our political times. More on Go Home.

  • In the Schools: Seeing Haiti Through a Young Girl’s Eyes

    Reading Books about Haiti with Kids at the Amiko Youth Program
    Photo Geoff Forester/New Hampshire Humanities

    I’m Your Neighbor Books has a mission to provide books in translation whenever possible in students’ mother tongue. That does three things – helps kids comprehend English, supports dual language learning, AND brings kids’ joy to see a book in the language they speak at home. I’m Your Neighbor Books provided Auntie Luce’s Talking Paintings by Francie Latour in Haitian Creole, the first language of three students in an after-school program I visited. Here’s a story I wrote about reading Auntie Luce with the students.

    Seeing Haiti Through a Young Girl’s Eyes Helps All Children Imagine Home

  • Discussion Guide for GO HOME, a novel by Terry Farish and Lochan

    The Story  

    Olive Ronan is a New Hampshire girl, born and raised. Samir Paudel moves to her town the summer they are both sixteen. He brings experience of another world passed down to him by his Bhutanese-Nepali family. Also, enter Gabe, the boy Olive loves, whose motorcycle is emblazoned with, “America is full. Go home.” The three teens become torn by loyalties to family and beliefs about who belongs in their town. Go Home is a timely and provocative story about immigration and prejudice. It’s also a girl’s journey into her own.  

     The Authors 

    Terry Farish and Lochan Sharma spent four years writing Go Home. Lochan was born in Nepal after his family was exiled from their home country, Bhutan. Now the family lives in Concord, New Hampshire and he’s studying at Keene State College. Terry writes novels in Atlantic Heights, a small neighborhood on the New Hampshire seacoast. Her books have won many awards. The book she’s most known for is The Good Braider set in Maine and South Sudan. Since her early work in Việt Nam, she has written about the migration of people across continents and cultures.  

    Teaching Books audio interview “Meet-the-Authors of Go Home”

    Ambika Shama, Terry Farish, and Lochan Sharma. Ambika Sharma, Lochan’s mother, Hari Sharma, Lochan’s father, and Lochana Sharma, his sister all contributed to create the novel.

    The Story of Migration from Bhutan 

    The young man who would become co-author Lochan Sharma’s grandfather built a farm house in Southern Bhutan. He was ethnically Nepali and had left Nepal because Bhutan needed workers. They needed metal workers and people to work in the cardamon fields. Many Nepali-speaking people came and built farms on the hillsides in the southern and western part of Bhutan. They were called Lhotshampas, meaning people of the south in Dzongkha, the language of Bhutan. 

    Dzongkha is a Sino-Tibetan language written in Tibetan script. Bishnu’s Nepali language is an Indo-Aryan language and is derived from Sanskrit. (Asianstudies.cornell.edu) Here’s a map to help you see Nepal which is to the north of India; Bhutan is to the east of Nepal. 

    Worldmap.com 

     Praja Shapkota is Lochan’s great uncle and a scholar who studied at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University.  He was a source of historical facts for the authors about what happened to the Lhotshampa in Bhutan and why they had to leave their homes. 

    “By 1989,” Dr. Shapkota said, “the government established the ‘One Nation, One People Policy.’ ” Under this policy, they were forced to speak, and study, in the Dzongkha language.  They were required to become Buddhist and dress in the traditional clothing of Bhutan. They lost their land, farms, and citizenship. “In 1990, demonstrations against the Bhutanese caused many Nepali-speaking leaders and activists to leave the country for fear or incarceration. By 1993, more than 100,000 had fled or been expelled. The refugees spent 17 – 25 years in United Nations camps established in eastern Nepal.” 

    After 2008, eight countries – U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands – began resettling Bhutanese Nepali refugees in their countries.  By then Lochan was a young boy.  In 2009, he and his family made the journey to resettle in New Hampshire.  

    Reviews 

    “Go Home shows how teenage characters are grappling with some of the same questions igniting the political debate around immigration.” – Boston Globe 

    “Beautiful and powerful! Highly recommended.” — Margarita Engle, Newbury Honor-winning author of Surrender Tree 

    “Farish and Sharma bring important current social issues to light in Go Home.”  *Highly Recommended, 5-star review – CM: Canadian Review of Materials 

    “One of the most striking moments in the book is Samir learning to swim — not just crossing a river, but confronting fear and proving his determination to build a place for himself and his family in a new world.” — Narendra Sharma, Elizabeth City University, North Carolina 

    “The teens discover a deep connection through warm moments such as Olive’s teaching Samir to swim. Meaty and complex…a character-driven tale.” — Kirkus Reviews

    “GO HOME is one of the bravest books I’ve read…Co-authors Lochan Sharma and Terry Farish entangle their characters in misconceptions of immigration and then ask those characters to find their way out. This is a book for this exact moment.” –- Kirsten Cappy, I’m Your Neighbor Books

    Questions and Ideas for Discussion  

    1. Go Home is told in Olive’s and Samir’s voices in alternating chapters. How does this narrative style contribute to your understanding of the novel? 
    2. What does Samir imagine is American—in the refugee camp and once in New Hampshire? What does he observe at the River’s Tale Café about American businesses? What does he learn from his father? What does it mean to be American to you? 
    3. Samir has a small gold Ganesha, a Hindu god with an elephant head. Ganesha symbolizes success and learning. Samir always wears the Ganesha on a chain around his neck. Olive believes the white horse on the island is magical and powerful. What purpose do these amulets play in the novel? Is there an animal or other symbol that represents a strength to you in your culture? 
    4. What are the growing views about the Paudels, especially about Samir, that Olive confronts as the book unfolds? 
    5. Gabe’s best friend died of a drug overdose. What do you think the novel is saying about loss and grief and how those deep emotions affect what happens in the summer the story unfolds? 
    6. Gabe is loyal to his family and others in his community. Do you see evidence that Gabe tries to be loyal to his family and that his own beliefs are not the same as theirs? 
    7. If you could talk to one character in Go Home, what would you want to say to them?  
    8. What does Hajurba mean when he says “a horse is good luck. They know how to find the way home.” How do you think it relates to what home is for any of the main characters?  
    9. The novel explores people’s need to belong in a place. Can you describe a moment when you felt like you belonged in a place? What did you experience that made you feel at home? 
    10. The shadow side of belonging is a term used to explore a conflict between belonging to a family or community while that belonging makes a person feel they have to disown part of who they are.  Sometimes a relationship can feed a person or suppress them.  Do you see a shadow side of belonging in Go Home?   
    11. How do you come to understand new people or people who are different from you who come to your school or community?  

     Resources to learn more 

    Bhutanese Refugees: Life in the Camps
    ”Many people forget that despite losing their citizenship and property, refugees still guard their traditions, customs and dignity.’’ An in-depth website documenting the accounts of Bhutanese refugees.

    If Each Comes Halfway, Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal by Kathryn S. March, Cornell University Press, 2002. Kathryn March lived among Nepali women, learned their language, recorded their stories, and present them and their photographs in this book as the women and girls wanted to be represented. She collaborated with them. This study was greatly important to me and to my understanding of the cultures of Nepal, and neighboring cultures of Tibet and Bhutan.

    An Interactive Map of Migration New York Times, 2025. Opinion | A New Picture of Global Migration

    The Shortest History of Migration, by Ian Goldin, The Experiment, 2025. 
    “To move is human. Migration, therefore, is the story of humanity.” Goldin’s account is the big-picture I seek to share with young readers through the small moments of “cultural exchange” in my novels. Brilliantly, and in 270 pages, he tells the expansive story of migration, which is a “portrait of humanity.”

    “Poetry and Uncertainty” by Jane Hirshfield, The American Poetry Review, Nov. Dec. 2005.
    Dr. Lisa Pinkerton from Ohio State University and teacher, Meghan Kuehnle presented a workshop at NCTE, 2024, on uncertainty in literature as a source of hope. I offer this article they reference as a support for engaging in discussion around this novel (not a poem) with uncertainty and openness to a breadth of interpretations. I’ll offer further resources from Meghan, who is called “the queen of poetic uncertainty.” If you’re interested in this topic, contact me and I’ll send you more resources.

    Discussion Guide for Go Home a Novel by Terry Farish and Lochan Sharma 8-12-25Download