In this fairly short middle grade novel, Behar tells small portions of the story of four young girls in a family across multiple generations. One travels out of Spain in the 1400s with her family after the Spanish monarchs expelled all Jews. The next, four hundred years later, has to leave Turkey (where many of the expelled Sephardic Jews settled) after supposedly shaming her family and then settles in Cuba and eventually marry
someone her father arranges for her. The third girl, the daughter, signs up to be a brigadista in Castro’s newly minted revolution before having to flee to Miami. The last, the granddaughter, gets to travel with her family to Spain, full circle, and bring together all the threads of their history. I really enjoyed how Behar brought in these different aspects of history and brought a few things back at the end. Unfortunately, the story, overall, did not stick out to me because the narrative did not stay long with any of the characters making each character lack depth. I think that some middle schoolers may be drawn to it but not a wide audience.
This book made me cry. Allen took a traumatic event that happened in her own family and turned it into an incredible story. The main character, Isaiah – Ice – has a strong bond with his other brother, Seth, but struggles to speak up for himself. A little into the narrative something happens that causes the brothers to argue and fight. Ice desperately wants to apologize but then a tragic accident leaves his older brother in a
state where he can’t apologize and the entire family’s lives turned upside down. Allan crafted this story with such care including all the ugly realities of a situation like this, how a middle school student would see and be affected by all of it and how he might choose to respond. This might be a book that I would use for a novel study in the classroom.
I really loved this second installment in the Pahua Moa series as well as the discovery that at least one more installment is yet to come. In this middle book, Pahua now has to find her place in the world she discovered in book one, to adjust to the expectations that others have about her based on reveals of book one. She also puts an enormous amount of pressure on herself to fix everything that went wrong in the first book regardless of
whether it was her fault or not. I love how Lee centers Pahua’s culture and family and eagerly look forward to the likely concluding installment.
Duncan does an excellent job crafting a complete story with depth in a short amount of pages about a subject that should be handled with care which she did as well. The main character travels with her mom and younger brother from the United States to her mom’s childhood home in Canada for their annual vacation. The book opens with a confrontation between her mom and the border guard who would not recognize her
tribal id. This places the narrative in context and orients the reader to the coming primary conflict, the discovery of unmarked graves at the site of a former boarding school for First Nations children stolen from their homes and families, the same school that the main character’s grandfather was taken to. The different members of this family come together to support their family, other survivors and their families as well as the victims. Duncan could have gone deeper and made this story longer but I think that would have altered the effectiveness of this narrative which opens the door for dialogue and cultivates curiosity to learn more about the stories and histories of these people, how they, yes, suffered but still persisted as well as to point out the horrific actions of the oppressors. I think that Duncan created an excellent, age-appropriate novel.