Rating: WARTY!
This one sounded interesting from the blurb, but it quickly turned into a clone of all the other stories of illegal immigrants in the American South - or in this case the Northeast. Eleven-year-old Tyler's family hires migrant Mexicans to work on their Vermont farm. They don't worry too much about whether the workers are legal. Tyler gets to know the migrants' oldest daughter until he learns that she's there illegally.
I got to about one third the way through this and quickly lost interest. This story is nothing more than a duplicate of every other such story, showing Mexicans as struggling, trying to build a better life for themselves, which no one can blame a family for, but just like all the other stories, it depicts the Mexicans as religious, family-centric, and it tosses in cozy Hispanic family words like Tio and Abuelita. But if every story of this nature depicts Mexicans as just like all the other Mexicans, isn't that racist? It sure seems that way to me. Why are these writers not interested in telling a different story: in stretching themselves and pushing the envelope instead of parroting the precise same thing all the other writers have already spewed ad nauseam?
I'm sorry but I'm not going to rate a novel as a worthy read when it's a Xerox of every other story and rather male-centric to boot. I do like it for the idea it gave me, but that's as far as I can compliment it!
