City of Orphans

Description of book: This is the fictional account of a young immigrant boy's experiences with street life and family life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1330's. The grimy details and historic hardships outlined in Russell Freedman's Immigrant Kids are all here.

Text Complexity

Lexile Level: HL570L

Qualitative Level: Straightforward language structure; some dated street slang/dialect. Mature themes, including homelessness, bullying, and gang violence.

Reader Task Level: Class set for independent reading with support of close reading and class discussion.

Immigrant Kids might be read as an anticipatory set piece to this story; Students will find themselves in a familiar environment when they read the novel.