Eleven-year-old Margarito, a big fan of the form of wrestling known as lucha libre, begins to suspect that he has a close connection with his favorite luchador, El Angel de La Guardia, the Guardian Angel.
Lupita, a budding actor and poet in a close-knit Mexican American immigrant family, comes of age as she struggles with adult responsibilities during her mother’s battle with cancer in this young adult novel in verse. When Lupita learns Mami has cancer, she is terrified by the possibility of losing her mother, the anchor of her close-knit family. Suddenly, being a high school student, starring in a play, and dealing with friends who don’t always understand, become less important than doing whatever she can to save Mami’s life. While her father cares for Mami at an out-of-town clinic, Lupita takes charge of her seven younger siblings. As Lupita struggles to keep the family afloat, she takes refuge in the shade of a mesquite tree, where she escapes the chaos at home to write. Forced to face her limitations in the midst of overwhelming changes and losses, Lupita rediscovers her voice and finds healing in the power of words. Told with honest emotion in evocative free verse, Lupita’s journey toward hope is captured in moments that are alternately warm and poignant. Under the Mesquite is an empowering story about testing family bonds and the strength of a young woman navigating pain and hardship with surprising resilience.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume IV, Issue 4
This book has been included in WOW’s Language and Learning: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction Booklist. For our current list, visit our Booklist page under Resources in the green navigation bar.
A young girl and her mother put on their red dresses and dance their way through the barrio, collecting friends and neighbors along the way as they go to the park to hear her father’s salsa band play. Let’s Dance!
On her first day at a new school, Adelita makes new friends through a lesson on vegetables, including how some vegetables are “cousins” because they share certain characteristics.
Clara’s grumpiness leads her mother to take her to a neighbor who is a curandera, or healer, and although she is puzzled by her “treatment,” Clara dutifully helps her neighbors, is kind to her siblings, and reads more books for a week.
A collection of thirteen short stories about the ups and downs of being thirteen years old.
In 1940, Hans and Margret Rey fled their Paris home as the German army advanced. They began their harrowing journey on bicycles, pedaling to Southern France with children’s book manuscripts among their few possessions. Louise Borden combed primary resources, including Hans Rey’s pocket diaries, to tell this dramatic true story. Archival materials introduce readers to the world of Hans and Margret Rey while Allan Drummond dramatically and colorfully illustrates their wartime trek to a new home. Follow the Rey’s amazing story in this unique large format book that resembles a travel journal and includes full-color illustrations, original photos, actual ticket stubs and more. A perfect book for Curious George fans of all ages.
After his home was invaded by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers, a young Kurdish boy named Mohammed and his mother take on a daring quest to flee Iraq; risking their lives to travel through several countries in order to reach freedom in England.
Describes the experiences of a family of Cambodian refugees as they learn to adjust to a different way of life in the United States while holding on to their ethnic heritage.
This book explains the differences between being a refugee, an internally displaced person and an economic migrant. Readers can find out about the experience of being forced from your home and understand how many people in the world are treated in this way. Together with case studies and quotes from people with different experiences of being refugees, this book provides all the facts readers need to make their own minds up about the subject.