The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto – An inspiring, bilingual children’s book about togetherness & gardening – #bookreview

 

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The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto

Diane de Anda

Oksana Kemarskaya (illustrations)

(Piñata Books, hardcover)

 

The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto is a warm, inspiring tale of family and neighborhood togetherness and how a simple idea can grow and spread, starting with a grandmother’s fond memories and a young child’s energetic wish.

Nicely illustrated with gouache paintings by Canadian artist Oksana Kemarskaya, The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto is printed in English and Spanish. While the corresponding paragraphs are displayed on the same page, they are kept separate by small graphics that make it easier to read the book straight through in one language. At the same time, readers of Spanish who are learning English and English readers who are learning Spanish can easily compare how something is stated in both languages.

Published in 2013, The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto recently has received a Skipping Stone Honor Award from Skipping Stones: An International Multicultural Magazine, one of only 22 books named to receive the award. The book also was one of ten titles named an Honor Book in the 2014 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People competition.

Piñata Books is an imprint of Arte Público Press, which is based at the University of Houston and describes itself as “the nation’s largest and most established publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by U.S. Hispanic authors.”

The author of  The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto, Diane de Anda, is a UCLA professor and author of several bilingual books for children, as well as other works. Her book’s Spanish translations are by Gabriela Baeza Ventura.

Ukraine-native Oksana Kemarskaya has illustrated numerous books for children, including Planet Earth Projects and the Secret Lives of Plants.

— Si Dunn

 

 

 

 

 

Desperado: A Mile High Noir – A smooth, dark mystery set in Denver’s North Side – #bookreview

Desperado: A Mile High Noir

Manuel Ramos

(Arte Público Press – paperback, Kindle)

 

Edgar Award finalist Manuel Ramos writes some of the smoothest mystery fiction I have encountered in a long time.

In Desperado: A Mile High Noir, his protagonist Gus Corral agrees, very reluctantly, to help an old high school buddy, Arturo “Artie” Baca, attempt to save his marriage. Gus is supposed to deliver a hefty blackmail payment to a woman with whom Artie briefly has had a drunken fling. And, in return,  Gus will receive $1,000 for his efforts — but only after the blackmail payment is made.

Of course, Gus has a bad feeling about the deal and definitely doesn’t want to do it. But he is nearly broke, and his only job is managing his ex-wife’s second-hand store in Denver’s recession-ravaged Latino North Side.

There is an old saying: No good deed goes unpunished. In Ramos’s dark tale published in 2013, Gus doesn’t even get to do the “good” deed before he falls into trouble.

Artie is murdered, and the investigating detectives find the $1,000 check, made out to Gus, in the victim’s wallet. The cops are sure it is for some kind of payoff; Artie, after all, has been on their radar for a while. He has a police record, and he has had some profitable but unsavory dealings involving the gentrification of Denver’s North Side.

When Gus attempts to get the police off his back, he soon stumbles into new dangers that spill out of a war between rival gangs and the theft of one of the religious symbols most important to Latino Catholics. And from there, this excellent, multicultural noir novel gets even darker. No spoiler alerts here!

— Si Dunn

 

 

 

The Mystery of the Mischievous Marker: A Mickey Rangel Mystery – #bookreview

The Mystery of the Mischievous Marker

El Misterio del Malvado Marcador

A Mickey Rangel Mystery

René Saldaña, Jr. , with Spanish translation by Carolina Villarroel

(Piñata Books, paperback)

 

Here is an entertaining and educational short chapter book for intermediate readers of English or Spanish–or both.

Mickey Rangel, a fifth grader who has taken online courses in how to be a private detective, suddenly is summoned to the office of his school’s principal. He thinks he is in some kind of trouble, because, as he puts it: “A fifth grader is never summoned to Mrs. Abrego’s office just for the fun of it.”

Instead, Mrs. Abrego wants Mickey to investigate and determine which student at his school keeps putting up graffiti containing misspelled and misused words. For example, the spelling and meaning differences between “principal” and “principle” become two of the mystery’s most important clues.

The Mystery of the Mischievous Marker is the third book in the Mickey Rangel mystery series. The other two are: The Case of the Pen Gone Missing and The Lemon Tree Caper.

The three books’ physical construction is clever and convenient.  One cover flap is in English, and half of the pages are in English. Flip the book over, and the other cover flap is in Spanish, and half of the pages are in Spanish. And the two versions of the story in each book are closely tied together for language comparison.

This excellent bilingual series offers many educational possibilities for individual students age 8 and up, groups of young readers, teachers, parents, and just about anyone else studying Spanish or English at an intermediate comprehension level.

— Si Dunn

 

Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip Series – 11 essays reflect on these important border writings – #bookreview

Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip Series

A Retrospective, New Directions

Edited by Stephen Miller and José Pablo Villalobos

(Arté Publico Press – paperback)

The 15 books in Rolando Hinojosa’s “Klail City Death Trip Series” look closely at what happens to people who live along a border that separates two nations with many linguistic and cultural differences.

Specifically, Hinojosa has focused on the relations between Mexican Americans and Anglo Americans born and raised in the same place, in this case a fictional border town known as Klail City, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. The books are set in a time when growth in the Hispanic population of the United States is surging, and Klail City is being transformed from a sleepy border village to a modern city facing modern issues: drug violence, women’s rights, discrimination, and change-related tensions between generations.

Hinojosa’s famed series was published between 1973 and 2006, and numerous reviewers have pointed out that Klail City offers noteworthy echoes of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s fictional town, Macondo, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as William Faulkner‘s Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional setting for most of his novels.

The two editors of this essay collection (both are Spanish professors at Texas A&M University)  contend that the Klail City Death Trip Series “may well be the most innovative and complex project of literary creation ever conceived and realized by a writer based in the United States.”

The 11 essays they selected examine Hinojosa’s series from several perspectives, organized under headings of “Broad Studies” and “Specialized Studies.” The varying views can provide essential information for scholars and students seeking a deeper understanding of  Hinojosa’s impact as a writer. And they can be important viewpoints, as well, for those who study issues facing persons who live in bilingual, bicultural areas along the Texas-Mexico border.

One example is José Limón’s essay examining regionalism in the writings of  Hinojosa and Texas novelist Larry McMurtry.

“Mexican-American and Anglo-American writing in Texas ought not to be treated as separate and unequal domains,” Limón argues. “From the beginning of what is now called Texas, these two peoples have been quite aware of and involved with each other, often painfullyso; that is, they have not particularly been friends, but nor have they been strangers to each other.” (Limón is director of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies.)

Limón continues: “Even in hostility both have had to share Texas and what Texas has gone through historically as it has had to come to terms with yet a third force, not ethnic but economic, as Texas gradually came to be incorporated into the United States, but more fundamentally, and for better or worse, into the economic and cultural world system of capitalism.”

— Si Dunn

Feminist and Abolitionist: The Story of Emilia Casanova – #history #bookreview

Feminist and Abolitionist

The Story of Emilia Casanova
Virginia Sánchez Casanova
(Piñata Books – paperback)

This important new addition to Arte Público’s “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage” series is aimed at young adult readers and is told in first person as a fictionalized historical memoir. Feminist and Abolitionist tells the story of a woman who was born into an elite, slave-holding family in Cuba in 1832 but spent much of her adult life in New York City in the mid-19th century and later. There, Emilia Casanova became involved in promoting Cuban independence from Spain. She created the first women’s political organization dedicated to supporting the rebel cause during what was known as Cuba’s Ten Years’ War. She also became involved in campaigns to free American slaves. And she smuggled anti-Spain documents into Cuba in 1857 and spread seeds of insubordination until she and her family were forced to flee to the U.S.