Welcome to the New World follows one Syrian family trying to rebuild its life in Connecticut. Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan use reported scenes and expressive drawings to make the Aldabaans’ experience vivid—not as a stand-in for every refugee, but as a close view of displacement, resettlement and belonging in the United States.
What is Welcome to the New World about?
The book centers on the Aldabaan family, who fled Syria’s civil war and arrived at New York’s JFK Airport on November 8, 2016. Their effort to begin again in Connecticut unfolds alongside separation from relatives left in exile in Jordan. The story follows language classes, job training and school, as well as ordinary attempts to establish a routine. A death threat and a later move force the family to confront fresh uncertainty.
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This is reported nonfiction, not a fictional refugee allegory. Its focus is deliberately close: the reader encounters a particular family and the practical, emotional demands of starting over. The Aldabaans’ story offers a human point of entry into displacement and belonging, but it should not be treated as a template for every refugee’s experience.
How did the series become a book?
Halpern reported and wrote the story; Sloan illustrated it. The work first appeared as a series in The New York Times. The Pulitzer record dates the winning work from January 26, 2017, with installments continuing through 2017. In 2018, Halpern and Sloan received the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for the series, which the jury called “an emotionally powerful series, told in graphic narrative form.” The Pulitzer winner record describes it as chronicling a real-life refugee family’s daily struggles and fear of deportation.
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The book edition was published by Macmillan on September 22, 2020. It is 192 pages and carries ISBN 9781250806895. Macmillan’s book page identifies the edition.
How does graphic journalism handle fact and interpretation?
The comics form lets a reported story move between dialogue, scenes and visual emphasis. It can direct attention to a face, a domestic space or a moment of hesitation in ways prose handles differently. That expressiveness is also a reason to read carefully: a drawing can convey mood and focus without being a literal record of everything visible in the scene.
Sloan described a collaborative reporting process: “Jake would meet the families to report on their lives and how they were doing, write a script for the comic, and then go back to the families to fact-check everything.” The script then went through editorial review before reaching Sloan. Sloan’s Pulitzer interview explains this workflow.
A 2020 Scroll.in review notes that the book’s “Methodology” chapter explains why the family’s accounts needed context and fact-checking. It also points to interpretation and artistic license. The result is best understood as journalism shaped through visual storytelling—not a verbatim transcript or a memoir. When a scene feels especially intimate or emotionally charged, distinguish the reporting behind it from what the artist’s rendering communicates.
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Why tell this story in comics?
A family-scale narrative can make large subjects—war, displacement, resettlement and the possibility of belonging—legible through daily decisions and relationships. The drawings give readers a visual route into those experiences, while the reporting and context keep the story anchored in the lives of the people depicted. Halpern has described writing accessibly for younger readers; that is an aim of this work, not proof that comics are easier for every reader or that the form removes complexity.
For readers comparing nonfiction comics, useful questions include how the work distinguishes reporting from reconstruction, how it documents collaboration and fact-checking with subjects, how its visual style guides emotional response, and whether it stays with an individual story or widens to systems and policy. These are ways to assess different works, not a ranking of them.
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Who might find the book worthwhile?
Readers interested in graphic journalism, refugee resettlement or the craft of reported storytelling will find a specific family story and a concrete account of how reporting and illustration can work together. It is also a useful case study for readers curious about the boundaries between documentation and artistic interpretation. Its strength is that it asks the reader to attend to one family’s experience rather than reduce refugees to a symbol.
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