![]() A timeline is appended.įrom the July/August 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. Though the family lives in California and visits Cuba yearly, Engle feels like a different person in each place. Ending with a note of optimism - “All I know about the future / is that it will be beautiful” - Engle’s personal reverie gives young readers an intimate view of a complicated time and life. The book follows Engle's first fourteen years of life, focusing on her trying to reconcile the two halves of her identity: American (like her father) and Cuban (like her mother). ![]() ![]() Moving through elementary and middle school, the wistful young Margarita struggles to find her American self in a country that views her mother’s homeland as the enemy. Guarapo is sugarcane juice.” But then there’s the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and suddenly all is different. Roaming the countryside, she falls in love with “the lush beauty of a land so wild / and green that the rippling river / on my great-uncle’s farm / shimmers like a hummingbird.” Engle effectively contrasts the smoggy air of sprawling Los Angeles with the enchanted air of that small, magical-seeming island, and at first going between the two cultures is fairly seamless: “In one country, I hear the sweet words / of another. The daughter of a Don Quixote–obsessed American artist of Ukrainian Jewish descent and a beautiful homesick Cuban émigrée, Engle begins with joyful visits to her mother’s homeland as a child. 7/06), Engle explores her own past in this collection of emotionally rich memory poems. ![]() Well known for her portrayals of historic Cubans in verse novels such as The Surrender Tree (rev. Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir ![]()
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