(1) 4-6 In this lyrical verse novel set in 1965 California, Lula has lost her voice. She can only speak in "a whispery rasp" that doesn't help when she has to call out in the fields where she picks grapes with her family of migrant workers. It doesn't help when her father becomes angry and accuses her of not doing her part for the family's survival. And it doesn't help when there is danger and she needs to protect her siblings. With a stronger voice, she would make her case for attending school, but now that her mother has been stricken by a mysterious illness, that's not possible. When the exploited farmworkers start organizing and a woman named Dolores Huerta urges them to strike, things begin changing. Will her father be receptive to these ideas? Will her mother get medical assistance? Will Lula and her siblings return to school? Salazar seamlessly combines historical events of the farmworkers' rights movement and the 1965 Delano grape strike with a sensitive portrayal of a girl trying to make sense of the world. It's a powerful coming-of-age story filled with evocative language, memorable characters, and apt nature imagery. A lengthy author's note tells more about what Salazar calls "one of the greatest labor justice movements undertaken in United States history."

Reviewer: Alicia K. Long | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2022

(2) 4-6 In her second verse novel, Salazar (The Moon Within) draws on her own experience as an undocumented child living in East L.A. to tell the story of nine-year-old Betita and her family, immigrants from Mexico. Betita's father tells her that their people belong where they are, since the area is in fact their ancestral homeland of Aztlán--and that they, like cranes (used as a metaphor throughout), were always destined to return there. But when Papi is arrested by ICE and set to be deported to Mexico, "a place too dangerous / to call home," Betita learns that her family is "sin papeles," undocumented. Soon she and her mother, who is newly pregnant, are also detained, "locked into a / chain-link cage made for cranes." Betita's voice is sensitively rendered in Salazar's verse, whose varied placement on the page, along with delicate black-and-white line drawings evoking Betita's "picture poems," creates a sense of place, testimony to the experiences (including family separation and sexual abuse) of migrants and refugees detained at the border. Ultimately, despite the danger, Betita's family chooses voluntary departure; their bittersweet family reunion in Mexico leaves open the possibility that they, like the cranes, might someday return.

Reviewer: Anamaría Anderson | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2020