An Island Like You - Softcover

Ortiz Cofer, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0545131332 ISBN 13: 9780545131339

Publisher: Orchard Books, 2009

Synopsis

Judith Ortiz Cofer's Pura Belpré award-winning collection of short stories about life in the barrio!

Rita is exiled to Puerto Rico for a summer with her grandparents after her parents catch her with a boy. Luis sits atop a six-foot mountain of hubcaps in his father's junkyard, working off a sentence for breaking and entering. Sandra tries to reconcile her looks to the conventional Latino notion of beauty. And Arturo, different from his macho classmates, fantasizes about escaping his community. They are the teenagers of the barrio -- and this is their world.

About this title

About the Author

Judith Ortiz Cofer is an award-winning author known for her stories about coming-of-age experiences in the barrio and her writings about the cultural conflicts of immigrants. She is the author of many distinguished titles for young adults such as, CALL ME MARIA, THE MEANING OF CONSEULO, SILENT DANCING: A PARTIAL REMEMBERANCE OD A PUERTO RICAN CHILDHOOD, and THE LINE IN THE SUN. She lives in Georgia where she is the Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

From Booklist

Gr. 7-12. "Dating is not a concept adults in our barrio really get." The contemporary teenage voices are candid, funny, weary, and irreverent in these stories about immigrant kids caught between their Puerto Rican families and the pull and push of the American dream. The young people hang out on the street in front of the tenement El Building in Paterson, New Jersey, where the radios are always turned full blast to the Spanish station and the thin walls can't hold the dramas of the real-life telenovelas. As in her autobiographical adult collection Silent Dancing (1990), Cofer depicts a diverse neighborhood that's warm, vital, and nurturing, and that can be hell if you don't fit in. Some of the best stories are about those who try to leave. Each piece stands alone with its own inner structure, but the stories also gain from each other, and characters reappear in major and minor roles. The teen narrators sometimes sound too articulate, their metaphors overexplained, but no neat resolutions are offered, and the metaphor can get it just right (the people next door "could be either fighting or dancing"). Between the generations, there is tenderness and anger, sometimes shame. In one story, a teenage girl despises the newcomer just arrived from the island, but to her widowed mother, the hick (jibaro) represents all she's homesick for. Raul Colon's glowing cover captures what's best about this collection: the sense of the individual in the pulsing, crowded street. Hazel Rochman

About this edition

• Publisher: Orchard Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0545131332
• ISBN 13: 9780545131339
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256