![]() ![]() As Reyna and her siblings Mago and Carlos navigate their adolescence, they struggle to heal the wounds of their past-wounds left by their parents’ abandonment, their grandmother’s cruelty, and the trauma of their dangerous childhoods-while making a future for themselves in the face of continued adversity. In Los Angeles, however, the grass is not necessarily greener Reyna has escaped the rural poverty of her youth and the miserable household of her father’s mother, but now finds herself in close quarters with a father whose alcoholism, violence, and need for control have made him into a veritable stranger. When her father Natalio returns and offers to take her and her siblings back to America with him to live in “El Otro Lado”-on “the other side”-Reyna believes that all her dreams of happiness and comfort are about to come true. ![]() ![]() After her parents both travel illegally to the United States for work, leaving Reyna and her siblings in the care of their cruel Abuela Evila, Reyna is subject to indignity upon indignity and a seemingly endless spiral of abuse and neglect. Reyna, the author and protagonist of the book, is a sensitive, imaginative, and introspective child whose harsh upbringing in poor and rural Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico forms a foundation of poverty, abuse, and abandonment that she spends her entire adolescence trying to rise above. ![]()
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