Luna's California Poppies - Softcover

Alma Luz Villanueva

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0927534991 ISBN 13: 9780927534994

Publisher: Bilingual Review Pr, 2002

Synopsis

In LUNA'S CALIFORNIA POPPIES a young girl tries to come to terms with an unstable family situation and a harsh environment. Taking the form of a diary, the novel is exceptional in the way it so vividly captures a street-wise twelve-year-old’s voice. Luna is angry, despairing, joyful, aggressive, and admirable. Deserted by her mother, she is taken into the home of a kind stranger, who not only takes care of her physical needs for food, shelter, and security, but also encourages her to read, write, and study. In this new environment, Luna records her struggles and triumphs as she becomes a young woman. In the second half of the book, an adult Luna takes up the diary when she and her family move to the country and face a new set of challenges. A mother now, Luna muses on her past while she and her children face an unexpected obstacle in their new home--bigotry.

About this title

About the Author:

Alma Luz Villanueva is a novelist, poet, essayist, and writer of short fiction. Her work has won several awards including an American Book Award for her first novel, THE ULTRAVIOLET SKY, and a Latin American Writers Institute Award for poetry for PLANET with MOTHER, MAY I?. She lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

From Library Journal:

Holden Caulfield meets Anne Frank in this compelling coming-of-age novel by Villanueva (Desire), spun on the premise that 12-year-old Luz is writing an epistolary diary to the Virgin Mary. Here, Luz talks about her love for her Yaqui Indian grandmother and sorrow when she died, her ignorance of her German father, her abandonment by her mother, and life in the barrio. The highlights of that year the onset of menses, her first love interest come across with unabashed honesty and delicate touches of humor. The diary characterizes the flavor of Luz's groping for identity through its conversational tone, as words are misspelled ("sewerside" for suicide), set off in parentheses, capitalized, or underlined; in these confessions, Luz often comes across sounding wiser than her adolescent age would indicate. The first part ends just before Luz's 13th birthday, but the diary is picked up again 16 years later. In the interim, Luz has gotten married and had three children. On the whole, the adult section is less satisfying than the ingenuous young one. Less violent than Villanueva's Weeping Woman, this novel is a sensitive yet street-smart portrayal of growing up female in the Hispanic community. Recommended. Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bilingual Review Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0927534991
• ISBN 13: 9780927534994
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238