Esperanza Rising
by Pam Muñoz Ryan
Hope’s the hardest crop to grow.
For you if
your kid needs a story about a girl who loses everything and learns that hope is something you practice not something you feel
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Esperanza is thirteen in 1924 when her father is killed and her family's Mexican hacienda is seized. She and her mother flee to California to work in the agricultural labor camps — from wealthy landowner's daughter to field worker overnight. Ryan based the novel on her own grandmother's story. Esperanza has to unlearn the entitlement she was raised on before she can understand the solidarity the people around her have been practicing for years — the organizers, the strikers, the workers who already know what she's just learning. This is a novel about what class actually means when the floor disappears.
Where This Book Lives
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