While preparing dough for her family’s Christmas tamales, Maria discovers that she has lost her mother’s prized diamond ring somewhere in the dough and sets out to eat her way through the many finished tamales to find the missing ring.
- ISBN: 9780399221460
- Author: Soto, Gary
- Published: 1993 , Putnam Juvenile
- Themes: Christmas, emotions and feelings, Family life, Food and cooking, Hispanic and Latino
- Descriptors: Latinx in US, Picture Book, Primary (ages 6-9), United States
- No. of pages: 32
Making tamales with your family at Christmas time is very common among the Mexican-American students I work with. They (and I!) love this book. While my students especially relate to the cultural traditions portrayed in the story, we all love the sense of family and the satisfying story.
In this warmly-illustrated story, little Maria helps her parents with a Christmas time tradition: making tamales. The story takes a twist, though, when she decides to try on her mother’s diamond ring that is sitting on the counter. She goes back to her task of kneading dough, and only later remembers the ring, and believes that it has been cooked into one of the 24 tamales they made. She enlists her cousins to eat the whole pile in order to find the ring. One little cousin thinks he bit and swallowed something hard – is the ring now in his stomach? The heart the story is that Maria must decide to do the right thing and tell the truth to her mother. And the beauty of the story is the way the whole family reacts with love and humor.