Book Ten: Red Glass

Book Ten: Red Glass
Pages: 288
Finished: January 28

I read Renau’s other book, What the Moon Saw, when I found it at the Scholastic Book Fair this summer. It was subsequently “borrowed” by one of my students. I like to pretend that they borrowed it because it’s that good, and they didn’t want to give it back, and that they didn’t just steal it to sell at Half Price Books. Needless to say, I was excited to see this book in the library this week.
This is a book reminiscent of Isabel Allende and other authors that deal with mystical realism, but with the added twist of being a truly young adult book. While it doesn’t pull too many punches, it is written with a younger audience in mind.
Let me see if I can get the basic plot out. Late one night, Sophie, her mother, and her step-father Juan are called to the hospital, where a five year old boy has just been found wandering in the desert near Tucson, Arizona with Juan’s business card in his pocket. Having crossed the border with his parents, who died, he is taken in by Sophie and her family, until, after a year of muteness, the little boy Pablo, regains his ability to talk, and he and Sophie embark of a trip of legendary proportions to reach Pablo’s home village, joined by her crazy great-aunt Dika, her “boyfriend” Mr. Lorenzo, and Mr. Lorenzo’s mysterious and good-looking son, Angel.
Were there parts of the story that annoyed me greatly? Certainly. No self-respecting mother should allow her 15 year old daughter to go in a van to Mexico without going along for the ride. I don’t feel that allowing Sophie to go to Mexico with your great-aunt to be really that reliable. Certainly no intelligent person would have purposefully traveled into Guatemala 10 years ago, even if it was with a close family member. The characters were interesting, but had the quality of being the best or worst that they could be.
Parts I love: Each part of the book begins with a quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, one of my absolute favorite children’s books. I also love the insights of the narrator. Sophie sees the world in occasionally naïve and trusting ways that defy her initial characterization as being a worry-wart and a wallflower.

My favorite quote is the beginning of Part Six: “When you look up at the sky at night, since I’ll be living on one of them, since I’ll be laughing on one of them, for you it’ll be as if all the stars are laughing. You’ll have stars that can laugh!” –The Little Prince
My favorite quote from the actual book:
“In English class, we read a book with a passage I underlined that said when it comes to explaining to other people what’s deepest and truest and most important to us, each person is trapped in her own tower and everyone speaks a different language, and the only words we share are things like ‘It’s going to rain. Bring an umbrella.’ How can you express your heart’s deepest feelings with words like that?” (82)

I do also like the fact that she uses real Spanish, and not just the words that most gringos know, but the words that have real meaning in Spanish, but you don’t see too often, like chispa, and limpia, and comadre. I like that she threw real Mixteco into the mix, so that you get a real sense of the fact that even in Mexico, Spanish is not always everyone’s first language.

Overall, I found this book to be a delightful romp through a teenage girl’s bildungsroman, a coming of age in a mystical land where eventually everything can be set right.