Ada, Alma Flor.
DANCING HOME
New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2011
IL 3-6, RL 6.2
ISBN  1416900888

(2 booktalks)

Margarita, who goes by Margie, is so proud to be an American.  She loves all things American and she speaks English perfectly, in fact so perfectly that she barely understands the native Spanish of her parents, both of whom immigrated to the United States from Mexico before she was born.  Margie soon learns that her cousin Lupe, who she has never met, will be coming to live with Margie and her family in California and she is excited when she learns that they will be in the same fifth grade class. And Lupe, whose father disappeared into the North several years earlier and whose mother has remarried and started a new family, is also excited about starting a new life in California and hopes to reunite with her father.  But the reality is very different for both girls.  Margie is embarrassed by Lupe’s lack of English skills at school and is mortified when their teacher assigns her to help Lupe.  Now her classmates will think she is maybe not so American after all.  At home, Margie finds herself jealous of the attention her mother gives Lupe when she braids her hair and when the two speak a fluent Spanish with each other that Margie can’t understand.  And Lupe struggles to learn a seemingly impossible new language and to adapt to new traditions and the strange ways things are done in the United States.  But then Lupe joins a folklorico dance class and Margie makes a new friend, Camille, who is not what Margie had assumed she was, and the girls’ beliefs—about what it means to be American and what it means to be a family—is forever changed.   (Booktalk by the Sequoya Youth Book Award committee, 2014)