Rupta Gupta’s new YA novel The Freedom Seeker

 

The Freedom Seeker

BY RUCHIRA GUPTA

 

In one girl’s relentless search for home and safety, The Freedom Seeker takes readers on a daring journey of displacement and immigration. Illuminated by the kindness of strangers across continents and the strength of the human spirit, renowned activist and award-winning documentarian Ruchira Gupta has written a powerful tale of resilience, hope, and the enduring strength of familial love. Did you know? The U.S. is home to the largest number of international migrants, with nearly one-fifth of the world’s total migrant population. Among them, 649,000 are recent

immigrant children aged 5 to 17. Globally, nearly 36 million children are among the world’s migrants, and half of the 34 million refugees and asylum seekers are children. Yet, these children are more than statistics; they are individuals with dreams, fears, and hopes. Stigma and bias often haunt migrant children like Simi, shaping how they are seen and treated both during and after their journeys.

 

About The Freedom Seeker: Twelve-year-old Simi Singh's life in Northern India is filled with love, family traditions, and ordinary worries about hockey competitions, school exams, and avoiding the snide remarks of her class nemesis. But when a single rock carrying a note crash through their window during their Id celebration, Simi’s life will shatter. Her Sikh father and Muslim mother’s interfaith marriage is becoming a target of violent vigilantes. Faced with rising threats, they must make an impossible choice: stay and risk their lives, or

flee their homeland. Simi’s father is the first of them to make the journey to the U.S., but when their petition to be reunited in America is denied, Simi and her mother are left with no choice but to attempt a perilous crossing through the Arizona desert with the help of a

smuggler. Throughout her nail-biting journey towards safety and belonging, Simi will face unthinkable danger— and when Simi and her mother are separated during the crossing, each led to believe the other is dead, she refuses to accept this fate. Alone in an unfamiliar

and unforgiving land, she must summon all her courage and resourcefulness to survive, find her mother, and reunite her shattered family.

 

 

Ruchira Gupta is a writer, feminist campaigner, professor at New York University and founder of the anti-sex-trafficking organization, Apne Aap Women Worldwide. She won the Clinton Global Citizen award in 2009, the Sera Bangali Award in 2012 and an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism in 1996. She has helped more than twenty thousand girls and women in India exit prostitution systems and her experiences with this work inspired her debut novel I Kick and I Fly. She has also edited As If Women Matter, an anthology of Gloria Steinem’s essays, and written manuals on human trafficking for the UN Office for Drugs and Crime. Ruchira divides her time between Delhi and New York. Follow Ruchira at author website