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INTERMEDIATE FICTION
Salazar, Aida

Land of the Cranes

256 pp. | Scholastic | September, 2020 | Trade ISBN 978-1-338-34380-9 $17.99 | Ebook ISBN 978-1-338-34380-9
(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

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