Breaking Through - Hardcover

Jimenez, Francisco

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618011730 ISBN 13: 9780618011735

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001

Synopsis

This sequel to The Circuit completes the telling of the young life of Francisco JimTnez, a young Mexican immigrant who worked, struggled, and sacrificed with his large family to stay alive and stay together in their new homeland. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Francisco Jiménez emigrated from Tlaquepaque, Mexico, to California, where he worked for many years in the fields with his family. He received both his master’s degree and his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is now chairman of the Modern Languages and Literature Department at Santa Clara University, the setting of much of Reaching Out. He is the award-winning author of The Circuit, Breaking Through, La Mariposa, and his newest novel, Reaching Out. He lives in Santa Clara, California, with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Jiménez' autobiographical story The
Circuit (1997) broke new ground
with its drama of a Mexican American
migrant child in southern
California. It won many prizes and was a
Booklist Editors' Choice. This
moving sequel is a fictionalized memoir
of Jimenez's teenage years in
the late 1950s, when the family finally
stayed in one place and
Francisco and his brothers worked long
hours before and after school to
put food on the table. First they picked
strawberries in the fields.
Later the jobs got better: cleaning
offices, washing windows and walls,
waxing floors. The prose here is not as
taut as in the first book, but
Jimenez writes with simplicity about a
harsh world seldom seen in
children's books. He also writes about a
scary, sad, furious, and
broken father--like the father in Na's A
Step from Heaven [BKL Je 1 &
15 01]. He stays true to the viewpoint of
a teenager growing up poor:
the yearning (What would it be like to
live in a house, rather than the
crowded barracks?); the ignorance
(College?); the hurt of prejudice.
Yet he celebrates his Mexican roots even
as he learns to be an
American. The images are powerful,
especially the one of the boy
cleaning offices before dawn, with notes
of English words to memorize
in his shirt pocket. An excellent choice
for ESL classes, this is a
book for many readers, who may discover
an America they didn't know was
here.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0618011730
• ISBN 13: 9780618011735
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208