Watched

Watched

An extraordinary and timely novel, a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor Book, examines what it’s like to grow up under surveillance in America. 

Be careful what you say and who you say it to. Anyone might be a watcher.
 
Naeem is a Bangledeshi teenager living in Queens who thinks he can charm his way through anything. But then mistakes catch up with him. So do the cops, who offer him an impossible choice: spy on his Muslim neighbors and report back to them on shady goings-on, or face a police record. Naeem wants to be a hero—a protector. He wants his parents to be proud of him. But as time goes on, the line between informing and entrapping blurs. Is he saving or betraying his community?

Inspired by actual surveillance practices in New York City and elsewhere, Marina Budhos’s extraordinary and timely novel examines what it’s like to grow up with Big Brother always watching. Naeem’s riveting story is as vivid and involving as today’s headlines.
 
Walter Dean Myers Award Honor Book, We Need Diverse Books
Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor Book
YALSA Best YA Fiction for Young Adults
 
“A fast-moving, gripping tale.” —SLJ, Starred





About author(s)
Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. Her newest novel, Watched, takes on surveillance in our post 9/11 world and is a 2017 Walter Award Honor and an Asian-Pacific American Award in Literature Honor. Watched is a companion book to Ask Me No Questions, which was an ALA Best Books and Notable, winner of the first James Cook Teen Book Award, and her YA novel Tell Us We’re Home is a 2017 Essex County Big Read YA pick.  In spring 2017, Budhos also published Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro & The Invention of Modern Photojournalism, co-authored with her husband Marc Aronson. Their previous book, Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science, was a 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist. Budhos’s other books include The Professor of Light, House of Waiting, and a nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers. Her short work has appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Awl, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Marie Claire, Redbook, and in numerous anthologies. Ms. Budhos has received an EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award), a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, and has twice received a Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to India, given talks throughout the country and abroad, and is currently a professor of English at William Paterson University.

Alternative names:

• ISBN Watched