Come On in

Review from Booklist Reviews:

The subtitle of this anthology provides an apt description of what to expect, but Come On In is about much more. Composed of stories about immigration and finding home, this collection showcases fresh perspectives of young writers from an array of backgrounds: Iranian, Guatemalan, Kashmiri, Korean, and more. Suitable for middle- and high-school readers, the writing styles range from understated to in-your-face, with the uniting element being the texts' ability to wrap around the reader's emotions and hold on. There is humor, tenderness, despair, outrage, and tenacity. Some stories capture the complicated generational discrepancy between immigrant parents and their second-generation children, while others focus on such issues as ICE raids, intergenerational love, extended-family camping trips, profiling at airport-security checkpoints, border crossings, and saying farewell-all under the shadow of the man in the White House. In the face of his prohibitions, Alsaid's collection seems to say, "Welcome, readers. We have something to share with you: our stories, which are not so different from yours." As a whole, this is a poignant and powerful collection of universal themes embedded with cultural specificity. The book is organized such that the stories are united by the theme of immigration, but each one stands apart in voice, experience, and style.