ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, YAL has increasingly embraced narratives about adolescents immigrating to the United States. The stories of young people leaving their native lands and adjusting to a new country—with all the complexities that such changes involve—have proven compelling to young American readers, girls perhaps in particular. In her seminal text on American female adolescents, Mary Pipher uses the metaphor “a new land” to analyze the changes in young girls that leave their parents baffled, and the girls themselves susceptible to all kinds of pressures. Pipher is referring, of course, to a figurative new land, but the challenges of adolescence are heightened when the new land is a literal one.
