First Person Fiction: Call Me Maria - Hardcover

Ortiz Cofer, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0439385776 ISBN 13: 9780439385770

Publisher: Orchard, 2004

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of AN ISLAND LIKE YOU, winner of the Pura Belpre Award

Maria is a girl caught between two worlds: Puerto Rico, where she was born, and New York, where she now lives in a basement apartment in the barrio. While her mother remains on the island, Maria lives with her father, the super of their building. As she struggles to lose her island accent, Maria does her best to find her place within the unfamiliar culture of the barrio. Finally, with the Spanglish of the barrio people ringing in her ears, she finds the poet within herself.
In lush prose and spare, evocative poetry, Cofer weaves a powerful novel, bursting with life and hope.

About this title

From School Library Journal

Grade 5-8–Through a mixture of poems, letters, and prose, María gradually reveals herself as a true student of language and life. Her family has decided that she and her father will leave her mother in Puerto Rico and make a home for themselves in a New York City barrio. The vibrancy of her life is reflected in her growing friendships with Whoopee and Uma, two girls in her building, where her father is el Súper. Eventually, she becomes trilingual, speaking English, Spanish, and "Spanglish," and through her words, María creates a rich portrait of a neighborhood that nurtures its own. A slight plot is woven in regarding the conflict over island versus city life, and which girl the handsome papi-lindo on the fifth floor will choose to flirt with. In both cases, there is beauty to experience on the surface, but one must look deeper to find true value. Understated but with a brilliant combination of all the right words to convey events, Cofer aptly relates the complexities of María's two homes, her parents' lives, and the difficulty of her choice between them. Particularly good for immigrants and second-generation readers, this is a quietly appealing portrayal of a Latina hija that many libraries will find valuable.–Carol A. Edwards, Douglas County Libraries, Castle Rock, CO
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Gr. 6-9. Dreaming of a better education, Puerto Rican teenager Maria reluctantly leaves Mami and moves to a mainland barrio with her father. A talented writer, Maria expresses her dismay in her gritty urban surroundings through poetry, wistfully noting the disappearance of words such as "green, blue, sun, mountains, music, friends" from her vocabulary. Eventually, though, sorrow is tempered by exciting new friendships; compassionate, inspiring teachers; and, most of all, the development of a poetry style all her own, mixing her newly confident English and her father's festive Spanglish. Maria's self-conscious attempts to forge a fluid, nonpartisan identity ("Am I an Island woman or a barrio woman? Can't I be both?") seems overdone, but her resilience as her parents' marriage deteriorates feels poignant and true. Ortiz Cofer, the author of the award-winning An Island Like You (1995), charts Maria's literary coming-of-age through poems, letters, and other narrative fragments, making this both structurally and thematically reminiscent of Sandra Cisneros' watershed The House on Mango Street (1984). Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Orchard
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0439385776
• ISBN 13: 9780439385770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144