Forest World
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From Young People’s Poet Laureate and award-winning author Margarita Engle comes a lively middle grade novel in verse that tells the story of a Cuban-American boy who visits his family’s village in Cuba for the first time—and meets a sister he didn’t know he had.
Edver isn’t happy about being shipped off to Cuba to visit the father he barely knows. Why would he want to visit a place that no one in Miami ever mentions without a sigh? Yet now that travel laws have changed and it’s a lot easier for divided families to be reunited, his mom thinks it's time for some father-son bonding.
Edver doesn’t know what this summer has in store, but he’s definitely expecting to meet a sister he didn’t know existed! Luza is a year older and excited to see her little brother, until she realizes how different their lives have been. Looking for anything they might have in common, they sneak onto the internet—and accidentally catch the interest of a dangerous wildlife poacher. Edver has fought plenty of villains in video games. Now, to save the Cuban jungle they love, he and Luza are going to have to find a way to conquer a real villain!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an evocative verse novel told in alternating voices, Engle (Lion Island) explores the challenges faced by "half-island half-mainland Cuban American families" after relations soften between the U.S. and Cuba. Eleven-year-old Edver has lived with his mother, a cryptozoologist, in Miami for most of his life. Luza is the 12-year-old sister Edver is surprised to meet when he arrives, alone, in the remote Cuban village of La Selva, from which he and his mother fled 10 years earlier. The siblings, both conflicted about the mother who separated them and abandoned Luza, find common ground in their love for the natural world their parents protect (their father patrols the forest for poachers). Trying to lure their mother to Cuba, the two unwittingly create a dangerous situation they must remedy. Filled with butterflies, hummingbirds, forest creatures, and fossils, Engle's affirming story is valuable both for the way the sciences inform it and for its careful attention to the relations between the Cubans who stayed and those who left the island. The late danger is fixed rather hastily, but the open-ended conclusion is realistically satisfying. Ages 10 up.
