Abuela (1991)

text by Arthur Dorros; ill. by Elisa Kleven

| back to Julius: The Baby of the World | forward to Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm |

• The main point of this story is the bond between different generations of the same family, reinforced by the shared experience of landmark places in the family's history.
• The concept of the book is to sweep the heroine, Rosalba, and her grandmother on a flight--halfway between fantasy and reality--over the city of New York. Along the way, they visit places of significance to the grandmother, as well as relatives engaged in various trades.
• The child appeal of this story is due to the universal appeal of flight, and--for hispanic children especially--the recognition of similarities between the heroine's family and language, and their own.
• The parent/teacher appeal of this story is in the way it builds self-esteem by encouraging a search for ethnic and family identity.

See for yourself. Purchase from Amazon.com
a hardcover or paperback copy of this book

My notes while reading the book

• Grandparents are often perceived by children as more adventuresome (and more sympathetic to the child's point of view)--possibly just because of their greater time availability. The feeling of complicity is even stronger if, as in this case, grandma is a bit of an outsider--like all children are.
• Interspersing Spanish words may reassure bilingual children that both languages are equally worthy of attention.
• But what's the connection between speaking Spanish and fluttering about? Is it a generic magical-realist thing?
  It's hard to see the girl's fantasy of flying as anything other than a pretext for otherwise disconnected tableaus.
• The choice of medium for the illustration feels like an art direction blunder. Collage excels at creating richly textural, flat images. To suggest the euphoria of flight, instead, the illustrator needs to pierce the surface of the page through illusionistic rendering. The sheer amount of detail, coupled with the shallow perspective, makes most illustrations in this book virtually illegible.

Class discussion

• Appeal: perfect freedom of flight.
• Security of having grandma along.
• All places visited elicit a story from the grandmother. The child learns her family's history, and gains a sense of her origins.
• Grandmother is not stereotyped as an invalid watching TV on a rocking chair.
• Pictures have a wealth of details for children to explore.
• Works the experience of speaking Spanish into daily life, teaches not to look down on foreign speakers.

| return to table of contents | return to SaneDraw home |