by Loretta Lopez
First sentence: “My body is still getting used to hers.”
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Content: While this is super short, and the main characters are eleven, it deals with some pretty heavy themes (including sexual and physical abuse, divorce, sickness, and death). It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.  

This slim book is three interconnected short stories, each one following a girl in a Manhattan Middle School. Elisa is fresh from El Salvador and is petitioning the US government for asylum so she can stay in the United States with her mom, so she doesn’t have to go back to her abusive grandmother and the predator she calls “chicken man”. Lucia accidentally catches her father in an affair and has to deal with the weight of that, and then the aftermath when she confronts him. Alice is constantly acting out in class, but her father is distant and her mother is dying of cancer. The three girls become friends over their sixth-grade year, as they deal with their trials individually and collectively. 

I wanted to like this book. (Well, I started out listening to the audiobook, but the first narrator, the one who voiced Elisa, made some annoying narrative choices.) I like the idea of interconnected short stories, I like the idea of looking at race and culture from different perspectives. And I do understand that children go through trauma. But I wonder who the audience is for this book. The trauma is not spelled out, though a smart reader could figure it out (maybe not an 11-year-old one, though). It’s short, so maybe it’s geared at younger readers? But, the content isn’t really appropriate for 2nd and 3rd graders. It’s a conundrum. 

That said, I think the book is good to have out there, and it’s always good to have stories about Hard Things for kids who need them.