Wayne Magazine Fall 2019 | Page 20

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.