A warm, funny and compassionate memoir.
A memoir by acclaimed novelist and poet Alvarez (Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA, 2007, etc.) about her pre- and post-earthquake travels around the island of Hispaniola and the Haitian boy who inspired them.
The author met Piti, a young migrant worker from Haiti, in 2001, on a chance visit to a coffee farm that bordered the one she and her husband owned in the Cordillera Central mountains of the Dominican Republic. Alvarez took an immediate liking to this “grinning boy with worried eyes” and began a friendship with him. She became close enough with him that she made a pledge that she would go to Haiti on the far-off, future day when he would marry—without ever thinking that she would be called upon to make good on her promise. In 2009, she received a surprise call from Piti telling her that she was invited to his wedding. Alvarez almost declined, but her attachment to the young boy won out and she and her husband returned to the Dominican Republic. As she traveled across the border, she experienced an epiphany: Haiti, though so close to her native Dominican Republic, was like the beautiful, tragic “sister” she had never fully understood. Eventually Piti called on Alvarez again, this time to help him care for his extended family in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Taken together, the author’s trips to Hispaniola represent an interrupted, but no less powerful, voyage that forced her to confront her darkest imaginings.
A warm, funny and compassionate memoir.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61620-130-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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