Red Glass (2007)

Laura Resau has written this story about a group of people taking a young orphaned boy to his home village in Mexico with adoption papers with the hope of finding any of his relatives to sign them. Sophie, her great aunt (Dika), Mr. Lorenzo (Dika's boyfriend), and Angel (Mr. Lorenzo's son) drive in a VW bus through Mexico to Pablo's village. Along the way we see the reasons why Pablo's parents made the desperate decision to sneak across the border to the U.S. After watching his parents die in the desert and being rescued after three days in the desert, six-year old Pablo was slow in trusting and communicating with his rescuers.

Pablo's grandmother, great grandmother and lots of friends are thrilled to see him return and welcome Pablo's new friends with open arms.

And once in a while she asked me to check on him, because he'd been a city boy
for a year and he wasn't accustomed yet to country life. I would find Pablo and
his cousins chasing lizards and playing hide-and-seek, yelling and laughing and
breathless from running. When I called them back for meals, they were always
rosy-cheeked, covered in dirt, loaded down with treasures they'd found in the monte and spouting off stories of animal encounters. Since we'd
arrived, he hadn't asked me once to read to him.

After Mr. Lorenzo and Angel make their way to their home village in Guatemala, Sophie learns that Angel was attacked and their passports stolen. She slips away from Dika with the copies of the passports Mr. Lorenzo had left behind and stikes out to Guatemala, regardless of the dangers of a lone, blond, teenaged gringa may encounter. Luckily she meets generous people who give her rides and run interference with bad guys. Yeah, right!

Reading about the countrysides, villages, and the warm, loving people of these countries makes reading this book worthwhile. The chapters are introduced by quotes from The Little Prince, one of my all time favorite books.

My rating for this book: +++