Ana María Reyes Does NOT Live in a Castle

author: Hilda Eunice Burgos

Tu Books, 2018

 grades 4-7 

Dominican

Eleven-year-old Ana María (Anamay) Reyes’s surname means “kings,” but she, her parents, and her three sisters live in a too-small apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, home to many immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Because Mami is pregnant again, the apartment is about to get even more crowded. And a baby will cost money, something the family doesn’t have much of, so budding classical musician Anamay is hoping that her performance in a piano recital will lead to a full scholarship at the posh Eleanor school, which her best friend, Claudia, attends. To Anamay and her sisters, the school “looks like a castle.”

My parents laughed. “Maybe we should live here then. We are the Reyes, after all!” Mami said.

Enter Tía Nona, visiting from the Dominican Republic with her fiancé, Juan Miguel. Tía Nona and Juan Miguel are fabulously rich, and they’ve invited Anamay and her family to the island for their wedding – all expenses paid. Though excited to go and spend time with her cousins, whom she hasn’t seen in years, Anamay worries about not being able to practice her piece for the big recital. At her aunt’s home, she notices glaring class differences. While everyone in Washington Heights seems to live at the same lower middle-class level, Tía Nona has servants, whom she doesn’t treat very well. Anamay quickly becomes disillusioned with her once favorite aunt:

I stood there and looked at the closed door. Tía Nona seemed different from the person I always thought I knew—a person who cared about other people and treated them fairly. How could I have been so wrong about her? And now that I knew the real Tía Nona, could things ever be the same again?

Ignoring her aunt’s warnings, the good-hearted Anamay befriends Clarisa, whom her aunt disparagingly calls “Cosita,” or “little thing.” Clarisa works day and night and cannot go to school, and when she gets a day off, she returns to her family’s makeshift home in a grim shantytown. Anamay unwittingly contributes to Clarisa’s firing, and she doesn’t know how to apologize or help. But she doesn’t forget Clarisa, even when she returns to New York City.

Anamay’s year is full of ups and downs, friendships and misunderstandings, dreams attained and crushed. Like most preteens, she comes to see the fallibility of the adults in her world—not only Tía Nona but her unreliable alcoholic Tío Lalo, and even her parents as well. At the same time, she learns the importance of forgiveness, or cutting others—and herself—some slack. In the hands of debut novelist Hilda Eunice Burgos, Anamay’s story is endearing and real. Music is threaded throughout as she struggles with the emotion of her recital piece even after she masters its technical intricacies. Readers will cry along with Anamay, cheer her successes, and appreciate the warmth of family and friends who help her along the way. 

*Highly recommended for all home, classroom and library collections.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Shame the Stars

author: Guadalupe Garcia McCall 

Tu Books, 2016

grades 7-up 

Mexican

As the Mexican Revolution rages across the border, Joaquín del Toro, the son of a wealthy Tejano rancher, dreams of taking over his father’s land and raising his family with his beloved Dulceña Villa, the daughter of a newspaper publisher. But a satiric poem in the newspaper—condemning the racism, violence, and general lawlessness of the notorious Texas Rangers—drives a wedge between the two families. The del Toros and the Villas agree that the Rangers are threatening their community, which has lived on this land before it was violently snatched from Mexico in the 1830s, but Joaquín’s father wants to negotiate with and appease the Anglos in power (hoping that local authorities will restrain the paramilitary Rangers) while, by means of the newspaper and the enigmatic opinion writer La Estrella, Dulceña’s father urges the Tejano residents to rise up and defend themselves.

Shame the Stars takes its inspiration from Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet, and like the original, this dispute between families is essentially a political one. In the first chapter, Joaquín’s father bans the entire Villa family from the ranch because of the newspaper’s incendiary articles and editorials. Joaquín must resort to sneaking out to masquerade balls and nighttime meetings in the woods—where coming into contact with Rangers is a constant peril. Ultimately, though, the families come together as Joaquín’s father realizes that the Rangers don’t want to negotiate but kill Tejanos, take their land, and drive the shattered survivors over the border to Mexico—and the elected and appointed authorities cannot or will not stop the vigilantes. While Joaquín and Dulceña’s families now face a common enemy, they don’t want their only children in the middle.

McCall’s powerful, well-researched work of historical fiction is told from Joaquín’s first person point of view, though she uses Joaquín’s poems, his and Dulceña’s letters, and actual newspaper articles from 1913-15 to offer additional perspectives. Joaquín’s poems capture what it was like for Tejanos threatened with ethnic cleansing: 

Lawmen have

been given free will

--orders to shoot

mejicanos on sight

In South Texas.

My blond hair

and freckled face

afford me a few seconds

to save myself.

A moment of hesitation

from a Ranger

buys me enough

time to speak out,

to clarify who I am,

establish that I belong 

on this side of the border. 

Readers come to understand the necessity of self-defense and the dilemmas Tejanos faced when confronted with a far more powerful and violent opponent, dilemmas that have become relevant again today on the border and elsewhere in the United States. McCall captures a history of cruelty and vigilantism that has been hidden from most young people (including those growing up in Texas). Her multi-dimensional teenage characters and the love between them will draw readers in and personalize the history. The family saga continues, one generation later, in McCall’s 2018 novel, All the Stars Denied is *highly recommended for all home, classroom and library collections.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 9/24/18)