Abuela, Don't Forget Me
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A Finalist for the 2023 YALSA Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award.
Rex Ogle’s companion to Free Lunch and Punching Bag weaves humor, heartbreak, and hope into life-affirming poems that honor his grandmother’s legacy.
In his award-winning memoir Free Lunch, Rex Ogle’s abuela features as a source of love and support. In this companion-in-verse, Rex captures and celebrates the powerful presence a woman he could always count on—to give him warm hugs and ear kisses, to teach him precious words in Spanish, to bring him to the library where he could take out as many books as he wanted, and to offer safety when darkness closed in. Throughout a coming of age marked by violence and dysfunction, Abuela’s red-brick house in Abilene, Texas, offered Rex the possibility of home, and Abuela herself the possibility for a better life.
Abuela, Don’t Forget Me is a lyrical portrait of the transformative and towering woman who believed in Rex even when he didn’t yet know how to believe in himself.
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Ogle pays clear-eyed tribute to his maternal abuela while covering heavy topics such as child abuse, financial precarity, and racism in this searing verse memoir, a standalone companion to Free Lunch and Punching Bag. Chronological vignettes depict Ogle's evolution from joyful toddlerhood ("My giggles cannot be stopped,/ they rush out like ants from a kicked mound") to tumultuous adolescence ("junior year names/ Beaner./ Faggot"), astutely describing desperate hunger, whiplash from constantly moving house, and the pain from his mother's physical abuse. Amid these difficult experiences, though, is Abuela's steadying presence; her unwavering belief in Ogle ("Your future will be bright," she says) and bone-deep appreciation for their shared Mexican heritage buoy him toward his future. Without weighing the narrative down, Ogle uses snappy verse rich in salient details and sprinkled with references to his previous works ("more than a punching bag of bruises,/ more than the butt of jokes at school where my lunch is free") to candidly portray the realities of his upbringing alongside Abuela's influence in shaping his identity. A bittersweet foreword references his abuela's dementia, which serves as a driving force behind this poignant story. Ages 13–up.
