Wounded Falcons

 

author: Jairo Buitrago

translator (from Spanish): Elisa Amado

illustrator: Rafael Yockteng

Groundwood Books, 2021 

grades 3-up

“It was a bad day at school.” Young Adrián’s face is bloody and bruised, his shirt is torn, and his fists are clenched with rage. It’s always a bad day at school. Adrián gets into trouble with everyone—except his friend, Santiago, who never has any problems and never has any bad days. Yet the two are friends.

Before going home, the two friends sit in the middle of a garbage-strewn empty lot “that doesn’t belong to anyone, where no one ever comes.” In a clump of grass, Adrián finds a young, wounded falcon, scared and unable to fly. The boy wraps the bird in his jacket to keep her warm, and promises to take care of her.

At home, Adrián looks to his mother for advice about curing the bird’s broken wing—but receives instead a mean-spirited promise: We already know what happened at school…Later, your father will give you what you deserve. The next day, Adrián skips school and meets up with Santiago in the empty lot “where no one ever comes.” Santiago takes him and the falcon to someone who “cures broken bones”—and pays for the treatment with his Christmas money. Together, the two friends gently care for the wounded falcon. And in science class, “even though the others laugh and whisper,” Adrián speaks for the first time, giving a talk “about birds of prey, about their strength, about their beauty.”

Adrián encloses the falcon and her nest in a box he has built and sets it in a tree. When he is sad, he visits with the falcon: “They know each other, they can feel their hearts beating when they are together.” 

Weeks later, there is a storm—and the two friends discover that “the falcon has gone with the squalls of rain and the wind.” The next day, they go back to the lot “that belongs to no one, where no one comes.” They look up and see a falcon—like a bolt of lightning—dive from the sky, grab a pigeon in flight—and scream to salute them. Santiago sees tears on his friend’s cheeks: “his friend who never cries, not even when they were both little children.” As the two friends silently go home,

Santiago thinks that Adrián has a big heart, even if he gets into trouble. Tomorrow when they leave school to go to the empty lot that belongs to no one, where no one comes, maybe they can see the falcon hunting again, and they will be closer than ever.

Young readers will intuit that the title—Wounded Falcons—refers to both the bird of prey and the bullied child. For the falcon and Adrián—both wounded and now healing—it will be a good day.

Buitrago’s sparse descriptions and economy of words—together with Yockteng’s digitally-created illustrations that resemble pen-and-ink drawings—lay out the scenarios and encourage young readers to draw their own interpretations and conclusions. The final illustration will surprise them. 

•Wounded Falcons is highly recommended for home, school and library collections.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 9/18/2021)

Un tren llamado Esperanza / A Train Called Hope

author: Mario Bencastro

illustrator: Robert Casilla

publisher: Piñata Books, 2021

grade level: 3-up

(Central American, immigration)

For many immigrants from Central America, part of their journey might be on top of a dangerous, speeding train. They often refer to the train as “La Bestia” (“The Beast”), and pray that they arrive in one piece. Un tren llamado Esperanza / A Train Called Hope is one person’s memory of that train ride. 

On the cover, a young child is stretched out on his bed. As he plays with a toy train—a gift from his mother—that crosses “the mountain of (his) pillow into the valley (on his) bed,” the boy dreams about faraway places: big cities, mountains, the Statue of Liberty. The boy we see here is a young adult now, and this toy train was his first present. He imagined then that “the girl in the window looked just like (his) sister.” 

Now, this young man is about to ride on a real train to meet up with his family, who are working “in far off places.” Not in a train, but on top, traveling with several hundred strangers—children, women with babies, young men—all sharing the perilous journey and little else. When they reach the border, all of them “leap down from the train and hide in the thick brush to wait for night to fall.” Now he “begs the moon to rise and illuminate the border”—

Ahora ruego a la luna que salga

y nos alumbre la frontera

para llegar a mi madre 

que con alegría me espera.

It’s not unusual that people fall from these trains and are killed. Casilla’s brilliantly detailed illustrations—created with watercolor, pastel, and colored pencil on cold press watercolor paper—show the shocked faces of five “passengers”—their fear and horror—as they ride atop the dangerous train and witness an almost fatal accident. A woman covers her face in prayer, a man squelches a scream with his hand, another woman’s shocked expression asks: “Why is all this happening?”

As a young adult, the young man and his mom finally embrace (he imagines)—they are together. He names his remembered toy electric train “Esperanza” (“Hope”)—because, unlike the dangerous train whose top carries agricultural workers from Central America to here, “it will cross the planet freely / uniting sons and mothers / carrying and bringing the happiness / that all children dream of.”

Pienso llamarlo “Esperanza”

porque recorrerá libre el planeta

uniendo hijos y madres,

llevando y trayendo la dicha

que todos los niños sueñan.

As Bencastro and Casilla transport young readers back to the childhood of a son of migrant farmworkers—the son who narrates as a young adult—, poet and artist together portray a deep and important story. Beautifully told and illustrated, Un tren llamado Esperanza / A Train Called Hope is not only about one family. It’s a call for justice for those who labor in an unjust society and have to ride atop dangerous trains to get to work. Although it’s accessible for young readers, Un tren llamado Esperanza / A Train Called Hope is not “just” for children. 

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

—Beverly Slapin

(published 8/24/2021)

Note: a companion book recommended for children is Dos Conejos Blancos (Two White Rabbits) by Jairo Buitrago, Rafael Yockteng, and Elisa Amado, which takes place on an actual journey. Its review can be found at decoloresreviews.blogspot.com dosconejosblancos.

—BHS