Take a look at what everyone else is reading in nonfiction this week.In this poetic memoir, which won the Pura Belpré Author Award, was a YALSA Nonfiction Finalist, and was named a Walter Dean Myers Award Honoree, acclaimed author Margarita Engle tells of growing up as a child of two cultures during the Cold War. This review is posted in honor of Nonfiction Monday. I can’t end this review without commenting that the cover is horrible, with a symbolic dove overlaid by half an illustrated face, and not at all appealing. It’s an eye-opening portrayal and certainly one that is relevant in the recent reopening of relations with Cuba by President Barack Obama, but not one that is discussed in-depth in schools, a disparity that is ironically addressed in the book itself and will impact and contribute to its obscurity. Instead, she waxes reflectively on idealized travels to Cuba in her childhood, where she rides horses with her cousins and juxtaposes them with the horrors of a closed Cuba after the Bay of Pigs invasion. Starting with some prettily portrayed trips, the second half details the prejudice and trials that the family faces. But this is essentially a travelogue without any travel. The word choices and verses are powerfully brief in nature, and fans of Brown Girl Dreaming may also enjoy this novel. This is another book I have a hard time envisioning recommending to someone unless they had a special interest in autobiographies, prejudices, and the Cuban/American tensions. In the beginning, her family is observed and questioned, but as the hostility continues Margarita can’t understand the animosity present, and how her fellow Americans are uneducated and unaffected, since she is privy to a wholly different perspective. But then conflicts between her two homes flare, and her family is unable to travel back to Cuba. For a while they travel from Cuba to the United States and back, visiting family and a whole new culture and world in Cuba. Margarita’s mother is from Cuba, and her father’s family is Ukraine.
In one country, I hear the sweet words of another.īut when I make the same claim in Spanish,
Publisher/Date: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, c2015. Title: Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir
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