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A review by rkw25
Pedro & Daniel by Federico Erebia
5.0
At the end of July I heard a book review on NPR by Matt de la Peña about this book: "Pedro and Daniel are gay, neurodivergent, Mexican American boys growing up in this crazy kind of chaotic household in rural Ohio." As a young child we lived in the next county to where these boys lived; I knew farms where migrant children and their parents picked tomatoes, and there were a few Mexican American children in my kindergarten and first grade classes who lived outside the tiny town. Yet much, but not all, of Pedro and Daniel's experiences were very different than mine, and 15-20 years later.
The book has a number of things to recommend it -- beautiful language, prose mixed with poetry, charming and despicable characters and institutions, sections told by alternating first persons and others in third person, dichos/sayings and other mixtures of Spanish and English, some illustrations, and insight into children's lives that were hard yet where the brothers themselves shared a deep bond. I will always remember the story of kindergartener Pedro, when told to bring "his one true treasure" to school for show and tell, taking his one true treasure, his younger brother Daniel.
Trigger warnings were given at the beginning, so I gave myself permission to skip chapters or stop reading if it became necessary. The use of some Spanish words I didn't know helped in giving distance and I desperately wanted these boys to survive and thrive. Things didn't necessarily get as much better as we might wish but then, this is an autobiographical novel and the world is not as kind as we might wish. My library has marked this book as "teen" and I hope teens, especially those who need this book, will find it. It stretched my heart, and that is always a good, if painful, thing.
The book has a number of things to recommend it -- beautiful language, prose mixed with poetry, charming and despicable characters and institutions, sections told by alternating first persons and others in third person, dichos/sayings and other mixtures of Spanish and English, some illustrations, and insight into children's lives that were hard yet where the brothers themselves shared a deep bond. I will always remember the story of kindergartener Pedro, when told to bring "his one true treasure" to school for show and tell, taking his one true treasure, his younger brother Daniel.
Trigger warnings were given at the beginning, so I gave myself permission to skip chapters or stop reading if it became necessary. The use of some Spanish words I didn't know helped in giving distance and I desperately wanted these boys to survive and thrive. Things didn't necessarily get as much better as we might wish but then, this is an autobiographical novel and the world is not as kind as we might wish. My library has marked this book as "teen" and I hope teens, especially those who need this book, will find it. It stretched my heart, and that is always a good, if painful, thing.