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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

This adaptation of Grande’s adult book about her early childhood in Mexico and young adulthood in the United States is always moving, at times harrowing, and also inspiring. In Mexico, Reyna and her siblings live first with their emotionally distant but wealthier paternal grandmother, and then with their poor but loving maternal grandmother. Their parents are in El otro lado (the United States) to earn money. When their parents separate, their mother comes back to Mexico alone. Her commitment to her children is unreliable, while their father, still in the United States, doesn’t seem to think about them at all. Then he returns for a visit with his new wife, and Reyna and her siblings convince him to take them with him back to the United States. After three dangerous tries to cross the border they arrive and begin to settle into their new lives. Reyna, 10, is learning English, attending school, and navigating a new family structure. Their father wants his children to succeed but also has a terrible temper, and he becomes more and more abusive as she and her siblings get older. Eventually, Reyna is able to leave for community college, where an extraordinary teacher helps her see herself as a writer. This memoir that touches on issues relatable to many teen readers always remains a personal and compelling story. (Age 13 and older)

CCBC Choices 2017 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2017. Used with permission.

From School Library Journal

July 1, 2016

Gr 6-9-In this adaptation of her memoir, award-winning author Grande chronicles her life, from living in Guerrero, Mexico, as a child to attending college in the United States. Themes of poverty, survival, undocumented immigration, health concerns, and domestic violence are juxtaposed against her deep yearning to experience her parents' unconditional love and support and a hunger to excel academically. Throughout the book, she describes how she struggled to hold family relationships and her own identity together under the relentless strains of an immigrant experience. Strong sibling bonds provided support as Grande doggedly worked toward academic success and her dream of college and a place to find peace. This honest first-person account may be a mirror for many readers, allowing them to see reflections of their own strengths, possibilities, and hopes. For others, it offers a humanizing window into the Mexican American experience. VERDICT An important addition to any library serving middle grade students, given its compelling narrative and the gap it fills in the available memoir subgenre for this level.-Ruth Quiroa, National Louis University, IL

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

From Kirkus

June 15, 2016
This moving coming-of-age memoir by novelist Grande was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in 2012. It has now been adapted for a younger audience.The grown-up Grande writes credibly in the voice of her younger self about growing up in Iguala de la Independencia in southern Mexico. The book starts as her mother is leaving for the United States to join her husband, who left two years before. Grande and her older siblings are left in their grandmother's care. Life in Iguala is one of grinding poverty and abusive treatment. Their parents have left with the dream of earning enough money to build a house back in Iguala; meanwhile the children have their own dream of being reunited with their parents and once more being a family. As Grande's parents' marriage collapses, their mother returns only to leave again and again. Eventually, their father takes them to the U.S. The author describes a life that, though different, is not easy on the other side of the border. They must live in fear of deportation, learn a new language, cower under their father's abusive treatment, and make do, always on the financial edge. Though redacted for young readers, this edition pulls no punches, and its frank honesty does not read "young" in any way. Read this along with Francisco Jimenez's biographical series, starting with The Circuit (1997). This heartrending and thoughtful memoir puts a human face on immigration's personal toll. (Memoir. 12-18)

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From Publisher's Weekly

Starred review from May 21, 2012
Award-winning novelist (Across a Hundred Mountains) Grande captivates and inspires in her memoir. Raised in Mexico in brutal poverty during the 1980s, four-year-old Grande and her two siblings lived with their cruel grandmother after both parents departed for the U.S. in search of work. Grande deftly evokes the searing sense of heartache and confusion created by their parents' departure. Eight years later her father returned and reluctantly agreed to take his children to the States. Yet life on the other side of the border was not what Grande imagined: her father's new girlfriend's indifference to the three children becomes more than apparent. Though Grande's father continually stressed the importance of his children obtaining an education, his drinking resulted in violence, abuse, and family chaos. Surrounded by family turmoil, Grande discovered a love of writing and found solace in library books, and she eventually graduated from high school and went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. Tracing the complex and tattered relationships binding the family together, especially the bond she shared with her older sister, the author intimately probes her family's history for clues to its disintegration. Recounting her story without self-pity, she gracefully chronicles the painful results of a family shattered by repeated separations and traumas