This is the story of two sisters who don’t know that the other exists. Yahaira lives in New York and Camino lives in the Dominican Republic, they both love and care about their father, Camino only gets to see him over the summer, so when she goes to the airport to pick him up and she hears the news that the plane he was on failed and crashed, her world falls apart. Yahaira is in class when she’s pulled out and told the news. In the span of a few moments, her world is turned upside down.
Told in verse, this book beautifully details these two girls lives and grief. We are aware that they are related, but the unfolding of how they figure out their related is both tragic and hopeful. I loved how we got to explore two different cultures of grief, and not only the girls grief, but the loved ones around them. This story is tragic and hopeful and I was close to tears while reading it. Elizabeth Acevedo is just so good at eliciting emotional reactions with her writing, it’s really just astounding.
If you’ve like her previous books, I think this is an obvious choice, but if you’ve never read her books, I want you to take that leap of faith and read this. I don’t know what I need to say to you to convince you to read it, maybe that it’s a powerful story packed into a short novel. If you have read this, please let me know how you liked it and encourage other people to pick it up too.
Just Read It 