*Starred Review* In his first novel for young adults, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1987) proves himself to be a powerful, adept storyteller for teens. Rico, a Cuban American teen growing up in Harlem in the late 1960s, is tired—of working extra jobs to help his family; of the chaos and tragedy at school, where students are so inured to violence that, when classes close after a shooting, they behave “like it was suddenly a holiday”; of being hassled for his light skin and hair. When his parents threaten to send him to a military school in Florida, he runs away. Together with his best friend, Jimmy, who has just kicked a heroin habit, Rico hitchhikes to Wisconsin, where Gilberto, an older-brother figure from Harlem, has bought a farm that he shares with several hippie college students. In an unwavering, utterly believable voice, Rico details his midwestern year, in which he adjusts to rural life, falls in love, and pursues his comic-book-writing aspirations. Most of all, though, he searches for a sense of self, ultimately realizing that “where you are doesn’t change who you are.” Frank, gritty, vibrant, and wholly absorbing, Rico’s story will hold teens with its celebration of friendship and its fundamental questions about life purpose, family responsibility, and the profound ways that experience shapes identity. Grades 9-12. --Gillian Engberg
*taken from Amazon.com*
Book Specs:
Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Atheneum; 1 edition (September 16, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 141694804X
ISBN-13: 978-1416948049
I read this book as an assignment, and we all know what kind of attitude that can invoke. When I honestly saw the cover I was a little confused. I was a picture of a white kid with his back turned looking at graffiti! And of course, as I read the book I found that I fell into the typical person that makes Rico so upset. (turns out he isn't white) Definetly a book for the older grades - not something you would find me teaching in a 9th or 10th grade classroom.
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