Finding Miracles
Milly Kaufman is the typical American high school girl, pretty, popular, part of a happy family in a small town. So why, when asked to write two truthful details about herself, does she say, “I have this allergy where my hands get red and itchy when my real self’s trying to tell me something,” “My parents have a box in their bedroom we’ve only opened once. I think of it as The Box,” and why does the appearance of Pablo, a new student from Latin America make her feel so uncomfortable? What is Milly’s secret–the one she has divulged only to her best friend?
Julia Alvarez, long acclaimed as an outstanding novelist for adult readers, turns her focus upon a young adult audience in Finding Miracles with the same skill that has made both In the Time of the Butterflies and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents modern classics. While exploring Milly’s odyssey from the security of the family and community that she knows and loves to the unknown territory of a whole new world, Julia Alvarez creates a character and a novel that extends beyond age categories into the realm of fiction unlimited, while sensitively examining issues of identity and culture.
Please join us this month as we read and discuss Finding Miracles.
During “Banned Books Week” in the US (Sep 28-Oct 4) people across the country celebrate their freedom to read. They display banned books and publicize the absurdity of allowing some to dictate what others are or aren’t allowed to read. Once you ban one book, banning season is open.
Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is an example of a book that was taken off the shelves for having “inappropriate language and sexual scenes. About a year ago it was banned from Johnston County’s libraries, in North Carolina, as a result of a formal complaint filed by the parents of a 15-year-old high school student. In García Girls, a semi-autobiographical novel for young adults, four sisters from a Dominican family recently arrived in New York face many challenges in adapting to American culture. The book is also the story of a family in search of freedom: they left their native Dominican Republic to escape a dictatorship.
The García Girls’ coming-of-age story was chosen by librarians as one of “21 classics for the 21st century.” It was also one of the four titles selected for “A Latino National Conversation,” a national project sponsored by the Great Books Foundation.
Alvarez, who received a Latina Leader Award in Literature in 2007 from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, remarked on the banning of her book: “This isn’t just an issue of my particular novel’s merit, but a bigger one about the curtailment of civil liberties.” Through her stories Julia Alvarez has quite masterfully created worlds that we all—but for a fearful few—cherish. In an essay titled “I, too, Sing América,” published before the ban on her book, she writes, “It was through the wide open doors of its literature that I truly entered this country, and that I began to dream that maybe I, too, could create worlds where no one would be barred.”
Check out The Kids’ Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the National Coalition Against Censorship which offers support, education, and advocacy to people facing book challenges or bans, and engages local activists in promoting the freedom to read. We must keep the doors of literature wide open, so that our children can enter whichever one is right for them.
