The book is called The Distance Between Us, which has been chosen as this year’s One Maryland, One Book selection. Her story is heartbreaking at times, and it offers a trenchant insight into the immigrant experience, and the experience of families everywhere as they try to heal the wounds caused by the problems of divorce, abuse and dislocation. Her memoir tells the story of her childhood in a poor Mexican village and the difficulties she and her siblings endured as her fractured family forged a new life in the United States. Her novels have won an American Book Award, the El PremioAztlán Literary Award, the International Latino Book Award, and in 2012, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This year, they’ve chosen a memoir by Reyna Grande. It’s kind of like a state-wide book club. She has her own dark story.Every year, the Maryland Humanities Council chooses a book which we are all encouraged to read, and to discuss at events that the Council organizes around the state. Her stepmother, for all her virtues and discipline, can’t show the children much affection. Grande searches all her life to find someone to mother her. The son of abusive parents abuses his own children. If the children fail in school, he will deport them himself, he says. They arrive, but Grande's father becomes a threat worse than la migra. Please God, let us arrive safely to El Otro Lado.
I tried to hold my breath, thinking that even the smallest sound could give me away. Please God, don't let them see us. I wondered if the people in the helicopter had seen my foot. I yanked my foot back when a beam of light fell on my shoe. The beams of the searchlight cut through the branches of the bushes.
On the third attempt, they succeed, despite a dramatic encounter with a patrolling helicopter: He takes his three children across the border with a coyote. Grande’s father finally returns to Iguala after an eight-year absence.
0 kommentar(er)
