by Christina Diaz Gonzalez
ages: 11+
First sentence: “I watched as a white heron circled the beach and then headed north toward the open waters of the tropics.”
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Lucia’s life isn’t all that bad. Sure, her mother is a bit overprotective, not letting her wear makeup or cut her hair short like the fashionable girls. Ans sure, her little brother Frankie is annoying. But, she has her best friend to giggle over boys with, her father has a good job, and Castro’s revolution hasn’t reached her home town of Puerto Mejares, Cuba.

Then one day, it does, and Lucia’s world turns upside down. Her father is resistant to participating in the revolution, and Lucia inadvertently sees things she shouldn’t have. After a couple of show-downs with the soldiers, Lucia’s parents do the unthinkable: they choose to send Lucia and Frankie to the U.S. for asylum, by themselves. They can only hope that their parents will be able to join them later.

The first half of the book deals with the situation in Cuba, and it’s a dire one. It reminded me of the books I’ve read about the Iranian revolution: controlling, threatening, and very scary, especially for an American, because we’ve never experienced anything like it. There’s a couple of instances, near brushes with rape and death, that made me wonder if this really is a middle grade book. But it’s all very tasteful — barely brushing the surface — and it adds to the tension in the book.

The second half is about Lucia and Frankie in America — specifically Grand Island, Nebraska. They struggle to fit in at first, but the couple they are placed with, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter, are kind and well-meaning, and eventually they find a place. The struggle then becomes with being in American and keeping themselves Cuba. And for Lucia, desperately missing home and her parents. It’s tough, but they do find a way to balance everything.

It’s an interesting novel, and addresses something I’d not heard of before in the exile of Cuban children during the revolution. Well-written and well-developed, it’s an excellent book.

by Cynthia Lord
ages: 9+
First sentence: “‘The ferry’s coming!'”
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This is on my pile for Cybils reading, but Jen’s recent review prompted me to pull it off the pile sooner rather than later. And I’m so glad I did.

Tess lives in Bethsaida, a small fishing island off the coast of Maine. It’s so small, that they only have a one-room school, where her mother is the teacher. And because lobstering is no longer what it used to be, people keep moving off, and the state of Maine is threatening to close the school, which means Tess and her family would have to move.

That is, until Reverend Beal comes up with the idea to take on foster children. If they add as many children as those that have moved out, maybe they could save the school. Tess’s family is one of those who take on a foster child, a 13-year-old boy named Aaron. She hopes, and wishes, that this will be exactly what her family and the island (and maybe even Aaron) needs. But then, sometimes, everything you wish for doesn’t always turn out the way you’ve planned.

It’s a quiet book, one where the characters and setting are forefront, and shine like they should. Lord’s writing captured the quiet homeyness of island living — both the positive and the negative; there were some wonderfully nosy characters. She also captured the idea of finding a place; Aaron is a wonderfully complex character, someone who wants and needs a home, but is reluctant, because of his past, to dive in headfirst and give everything over to Tess and her family. It’s a slow process, one with bumps and hiccups, but because you care about the characters, you want it to succeed.

And with some luck, it will.

(Just for the record: because this is a Cybils nominee, I’ve been asked to make sure y’all know this is my opinion only, and not that of the panel.)

by Deborah Wiles
ages: 10+
First sentence: “I am eleven years old and I am invisible.”
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It’s the fall of 1962, and there’s tension in the air. Fifth-grader Franny Chapman is not quite sure what’s going on with her best friend; her Uncle Otts seems to be not quite there anymore, instead spending more and more time fighting an old war in his head. Her mother is distracted, her father is gone, her older sister is choosing to spend time with her college friends and leaving Franny behind. Even her teacher has skipped her every single time when it’s her turn to read aloud in school.

On top of all that, the president — John F. Kennedy, for those of us who didn’t do well in history — has just informed the country that the Soviet Union is sending missiles to Cuba that have the potential to blow the entire country up. Franny only wants to be worried about going to her first boy-girl party, not whether or not she’s going to live to see tomorrow.

This book is billed as a “documentary novel”; the narrative is interspersed with pictures and quotes and clippings (there’s a Fallout Shelter Instruction Manual!), presumably to give the reader (who, we assume, didn’t do well in history either) some frame of reference. And taken separately, both the non-fiction parts and the fiction parts were interesting. I kind of liked Franny, and her struggles. I wanted to smack her mom, and I kind of felt that Wiles was playing up an early-60s mom stereotype: the bridge-playing, cigarette-smoking, mostly absent mom who was a very strict disciplinarian when she was around, and yet somehow had a soft heart for her children, though her son saw it more. (We’ve come a long way, baby.) And I liked the non-fiction parts as well. The quotes, the bios of notable people, the pictures were all fascinating to look at.

I just think this book tried to do too much in combining both. The narrative felt interrupted to me, and I didn’t get the sense of foreboding about the Cuban Missile Crisis that I think the author wanted us to get. In some ways, I think this would have worked better as a straight-up non-fiction book, like Marching for Freedom or Claudette Colvin. Combined with quotes and interviews, this could have been a compelling book. (I’d love to see one done from a Cuban perspective, personally.) But as it is, the book fell short in many ways for me. It tried to do too much (there’s even a faint subplot about the race issues in the country at the time, but it was never developed enough to do much with), and because of that, it didn’t do enough.

Which is just too bad.

(Just for the record: because this is a Cybils nominee, I’ve been asked to make sure y’all know this is my opinion only, and not that of the panel.)