Antes de ser libres (Spanish Edition) - Softcover

Alvarez, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375815457 ISBN 13: 9780375815454

Publisher: Laurel Leaf, 2004

Synopsis

Now available in Spanish, the book Horn Book called “a realistic and compelling account of a girl growing up too quickly while coming to terms with the cost of freedom.”

I wonder what it would be like to be free? Not to need wings because you don’t have to fly away from your country?

From award-winning author Julia Alvarez comes the story of Anita de la Torre, a 12-year-old girl living in the Dominican Republic in 1960. Most of her relatives have immigrated to the United States, her Tío Toni has disappeared, Papi has been getting mysterious phone calls about butterflies and someone named Mr. Smith, and the secret police have started terrorizing her family for their suspected opposition to the country’s dictator. While Anita deals with a frightening series of events, she also struggles with her adolescence and her own personal flight to be free.

About this title

Review:

What would life be like for a teen living under a dictatorship? Afraid to go to school or to talk freely? Knowing that, at the least suspicion, the secret police could invade your house, even search and destroy your private treasures? Or worse, that your father or uncles or brothers could be suddenly taken away to be jailed or tortured or killed? Such experiences have been all too common in the many Latin American dictatorships of the last 50 years. Author Julia Alvarez ( How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) and her family escaped from the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic when she was 10, but in Before We Were Free she imagines, through the stories of her cousins and friends, how it was for those who stayed behind.

Twelve-year-old Anita de la Torre is too involved with her own life to be more than dimly aware of the growing menace all around her, until her last cousins and uncles and aunts have fled to America and a fleet of black Volkswagens comes up the drive, bringing the secret police to the family compound to search their houses. Gradually, through overheard conversations and the explanations of her older sister, Lucinda, she comes to understand that her father and uncles are involved in a plot to kill El Jefe, the dictator, and that they are all in deadly peril. Anita's story is universal in its implications--she even keeps an Anne Frank-like diary when she and her mother must hide in a friend's house--and a tribute to those brave souls who feel, like Anita's father, that "life without freedom is no life at all." (Ages 10 to 14) --Patty Campbell

About the Author:

Julia Alvarez es la autora galardonada de De cómo las muchachas García perdieron el acento y En el tiempo de las mariposas. Sus muy elogiados libros para lectores jóvenes incluyen Las huellas secretas, Un regalo de gracias, la serie de la tía Lola, En busca de milagros y Devolver al remitente. Alvarez ha recibido varios premios por sus obras, incluyendo el Pura Belpré Award y el Américas Award por sus libros infantiles, el Hispanic Heritage Award en Literatura y el F. Scott Fitzgerald Award por su Logro Destacado en la Literatura Americana. En 2013 fue premiada con la Medalla Nacional de las Artes de Estados Unidos por el presidente Obama. Es una escritora residente en Middlebury College y, junto con su esposo Bill Eichner, estableció Alta Gracia, un centro literario y finca sostenible de café en la República Dominicana.

About this edition

• Publisher: Laurel Leaf
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0375815457
• ISBN 13: 9780375815454
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192