Q&A
Different,
but the Same
Local author Marina Budhos explores coming of age in a diverse America
WRITTEN BY MONSY ALVARADO
M
18
FALL 2019 WAYNE MAGAZINE
by Ask Me No Questions, in which
Budhos tells the story of two teen-
age sisters from Bangladesh who are
living in the country illegally, and
whose world changes when their
father is detained by immigration
officers.
Budhos, who is a Maplewood
resident and professor at William
Paterson University in Wayne, sat
down for a recent interview to
discuss her latest novel, and how
historical and current events
contribute to her writing.
“It didn’t happen to me, it hap-
pened to the kids a little bit older
than me, but I heard a lot about
it,’’ she recalls. “It was a huge deal
in our community, so I pulled from
that, but I also went to a pretty
tough urban junior high, where
things were kind of very compli-
cated. And so I pulled from my own
experience, even though I didn’t
do the busing.”
Prior to The Long Ride, Budhos
wrote a novel, Watched, about
police surveillance in the Muslim
community after the 9/11 terror-
ist attacks. The book was followed
YOUR BOOKS TOUCH ON HEAVY
SUBJECTS — SOME THAT ARE DIFFI-
CULT FOR ADULTS TO EVEN UNDER-
STAND. HOW DO YOU MAKE THEM
UNDERSTANDABLE TO YOUNG
READERS? It’s a huge challenge,
because frankly, I think if books are
didactic, they are boring, and a kid
will put them down. The way I think
about it is, I always have to have
the point of view of the child and
the character really clear in my own
mind. What’s crucial to me is always
staying close and attuned to the
young person, and how the young
person experiences these social pres-
sures. The other thing that interested
me the more I wrote The Long Ride
is, I was interested in the fact that,
of course, we all want desegregation
or integration at some level — or
most of us do — but it’s always
asking the children to do the work.
arina Budhos’
Guyanese immigrant
father and Jewish-
American mother
wanted to raise their
family in a diverse
neighborhood in Queens, which led
them to Parkway Village, an apart-
ment complex built for the families of
employees at the United Nations. It
was there that Budhos was exposed to
people of different backgrounds, who
would later become the inspirations for
characters in her Young Adult novels.
“One of the lovely things about
growing up in Parkway Village was
that because so many of the families
were foreign born, and some of them
were going to go back to their coun-
tries, ultimately there wasn’t the same
pressure of assimilation that we might
have felt if I had been raised in New
Jersey at the time,’’ says Budhos. “It
was a really fortunate upbringing in
that way, so you could be who you
were even as you went to the American
public schools.”
Her latest Young Adult novel, The
Long Ride, which was published on
Sept. 24, focuses on the friendship
of three girls, Jamila, Francesca, and
Josie, as they navigate middle school
in Queens in the early ’70s, when bus-
ing was used to desegregate schools.
The novel, Budhos says, arose in part
from stories she heard and protests she
witnessed in Queens that centered on
integration.