Lights on the River

Teresa, a member of a migrant working family, longs for her grandmother's peaceful home back in Mexico

Following crop work from farm to farm, Maria's migrant-worker mother tells the family, "We carry our house on our backs." The intense labor, meager wages and squalid living quarters take their toll, and, to make things more bearable, Maria concentrates on her Abuela and the Christmas Eve tradition of floating candles on the river. Thomas's text flows languidly as she paints this harsh but very realistic setting. Her emotional prose sometimes sounds wistful and is never imbued with a false sense of hope, while Dooling's skilled oil portraits reveal a broad range of feeling. This unusual volume resonates with integrity and is not soon forgotten. Ages 4-8.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Teresa, watching her baby brother and little niece while their parents harvest cucumbers, remembers a precious visit home to Teresa's grandmother (Abuela) in Mexico--the camaraderie, shared music, and feast featuring a scrawny rooster and the Christmas custom of floating candles in little wooden boxes downriver past other villages. Now, a candle given to Teresa by Abuela is her one treasure. When the family moves on to harvest peaches, they are assigned humiliating quarters--a chicken coop with two dirty mattresses and a single chair, an outside pump, a filthy outhouse. Mami's anger, only expressed in the set of her lips, is paralleled next morning when Teresa visits the comfortable farmhouse and is given a cookie; hungry, she accepts, though ``her throat was so full of anger that the cookie stuck.'' Still, that night Mami lights Teresa's candle and the memory of home sustains them all. Thomas's (The Princess in the Pigpen, 1989, etc.) text and Dooling's somber palette and perceptive characterizations compassionately convey the emotions of these people while underscoring their dignity. A telling portrayal of Mexican migrant farmworkers in the US. (Fiction/Picture book. 5-10) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.