Margarita Engle, Author Holt $16.95 (199p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8936-3
Newbery Honor–author Engle (The Surrender Tree
) again mines Cuban history for her third novel in verse, this time focusing on Jewish refugees who sought asylum from the Nazis in Havana. Covering the period from 1939 to 1942, first-person...
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Margarita Engle, Author . Holt $16.99 (151p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9082-6
Engle spins her latest historical novel-in-verse from the actual diaries of a 19th-century suffragette, Fredrika Bremer, who jettisoned her privileged existence in Sweden to travel and take notes on the plight of the poor. In 1851 Cuba, Bremer was...
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Margarita Engle, Author Arte Publico Press $9.5 (164p) ISBN 978-1-55885-070-5
The narrator of this pleasantly rambling first novel is a Cuban-American poet raised in Harlem who returns to Cuba to visit relatives and to let them know that they are remembered by their family in exile. When a cousin, fearful of the Castro regime,
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Margarita Engle, Author Bantam Books $21.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-553-09987-4
Although it too often confronts harsh political reality with sentimentality, Engle's second novel (after Singing to Cuba) is a lush improvisation on Cuban politics and their effect on one family. Narrated by Carmen Peregrin, who was raised in the U.S
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Margarita Engle, Holt, $16.99 (160p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9240-0
Newbery Honor–winner Engle (The Surrender Tree) continues to find narrative treasure in Cuban history. Like her other novels in verse, this one is told in multiple voices (too many, in fact), some based on historical figures. The action takes place...
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Margarita Engle. Harcourt, $16.99 (144p) ISBN 978-0-547-58131-6
Based on the life of the author’s grandmother, Engle’s (Hurricane Dancers) novel-in-verse is told in the voice of Josefa, an 11-year-old living in the Cuban countryside in the early 20th century, following the war for independence from Spain and U.S.
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Margarita Engle. Atheneum, $16.99 (208p) ISBN 978-1-4814-9057-3
In an evocative verse novel told in alternating voices, Engle (Lion Island) explores the challenges faced by “half-island half-mainland Cuban American families” after relations soften between the U.S. and Cuba. Eleven-year-old Edver has lived with...
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Margarita Engle. Atheneum, $16.99 (176p) ISBN 978-1-4814-6112-2
Engle concludes what she describes as a "loosely linked group of historical verse novels about the struggle against forced labor in nineteenth-century Cuba," focusing on the formative teenage years of Antonio Chuffat, a real-life messenger boy of...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Renée Kurilla. Holt, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9839-6
Engle makes expressive use of the five-line tanka poetry form to study a family of orangutans living in a wildlife refuge. A sense of movement—sometimes dramatic, sometimes quiet—emanates from nearly every entry. Kurilla’s dynamic mixed-media images
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Sara Palacios. Atheneum, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-4814-4502-3
Writing in upbeat, intermittently rhyming verse, Engle tells the true story of Aída de Acosta, an American woman of Cuban and Spanish descent who piloted an early flying machine. While visiting Paris as a teenager, Acosta is awestruck by eccentric...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Rafael López. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-544-10229-3
A riot of tropical color adds sabor to the tale of Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who dreams “of pounding tall conga drums,/ tapping small bongó drums/ and boom boom booming/ with long, loud sticks/ on big, round, silvery/...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Rafael López. Holt, $18.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9876-1
Eighteen Hispanic individuals from diverse professional and personal backgrounds are honored in Engle’s plainspoken free-verse poems, written from each person’s perspective. “I struggled to become a teacher/ and a poet, so I could use words/ to...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by David Walker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-547-85286-7
A little rabbit yearns to be bigger (“He wished for a nose as long as an elephant’s trunk... and he wished for a tail as gigantic as a mountain”), but the only things really growing are his “two long, tall, powerful ears to help him hear every loud...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Mike Curato. Holt/Godwin, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-62779-642-2
The pre-1959 American car, held together, as Engle (Lion Island) so evocatively writes, with “wire, tape, and mixed-up scraps of dented metal,” has become a visual trademark of Cuba and testimony to its citizens’ resilience and ingenuity. One of...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Aliona Bereghici. Amazon/Two Lions, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4778-2633-1
In spare first-person poems, Louis Fuertes describes his life from a young devotee of birds to a career as a naturalist and artist. While Bereghici’s watercolor-and-ink art offers realistically detailed images of the birds Fuertes loves, whimsical...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Raúl Colón. Peachtree, $17.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-56145-856-1
Engle’s free-verse biography of Miguel Cervantes, the creator of Don Quixote, portrays the life of a boy in 16th-century Spain. The son of a compulsive gambler beset by debt collectors (“They even took our beds and plates./ Where will we sleep?/ How
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Margarita Engle, Author, Sean Qualls, Illustrator , illus. by Sean Qualls. Holt $16.95 (183p) ISBN 978-0-8050-7706-3
Engle (Skywriting
, for adults) achieves an impressive synergy between poetry and biography as she illuminates the tortured life of the 19th-century Cuban poet. Born a slave, Juan is kept like "a poodle, her pet/ with my curly dark hair/ and...
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Margarita Engle. Atheneum, $17.99 (144p) ISBN 978-1-5344-2493-7
The latest biography in verse from Newbery Honoree Engle (Dreams from Many Rivers) adapts the life of beloved Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916). First-person poems describe childhood abandonment by his mother, his years as a child-prodigy poet,
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Margarita Engle. Atheneum, $18.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-5344-6496-4
Three-time Pura Belpré Medalist Engle (With a Star in My Hand) offers a soulful historical novel-in-verse, following a matchmaking dog and two malnourished teenagers who fall in love in 1990s Cuba. Utilizing titled free-verse poems, Engle highlights
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Margarita Engle. Atheneum, $18.99 (208p) ISBN 978-1-5344-8693-5
Beginning in 1923 Cuba and spanning 13 years, Engle’s (Light for All) telling traces one young woman joining the fight for women’s rights amid her country’s misogynistic norms and policies. In Guanabacoa, 12-year-old Rima Marin, who has “warm brown”
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Margarita Engle. Viking, $16.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-593-20669-0
In 1947, 11-year-old Oriol and her family live in Santa Barbara, having migrated from Cuba to seek treatment for her grandmother’s diabetes. After the treatment fails and Abuelita dies, Oriol tries to process her grief while feeling isolated at...
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Margarita Engle. Atheneum, $18.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-66592-636-2
After a hurricane uncovers her parents’ hidden sculptures of chained birds, leading to their arrest for violating Cuban policies regarding artistic liberty, Soleida is forced to flee alone. The 16-year-old travels through Central America before...
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Margarita Engle. Atheneum, $18.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-665-93975-1
Seventeen-year-old Ana and her mother live in their car in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a rewilded military outpost. Most of her botanist mother’s government salary is being allocated to locating Ana’s disappeared father. While walking...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Sara Palacios. Atheneum, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-5344-4489-8
Engle (Your Heart, My Sky) tells the story of a brown-skinned girl who longs to return to Cuba. She’s first seen walking through streets with her mustachioed abuelo, selling frutas, their names given in Spanish and then English. He is a pregonero,...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Rafael López. Atheneum, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-4814-8740-5
In the dark days of the Civil War, a girl named Teresa Carreño sat down at a badly tuned piano to play for a special audience: Abraham Lincoln and his family. This book tells the story of how a young refugee from Venezuela comforted the grieving...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Beatriz Gutierrez Hernandez. Holt/Godwin, $18.99 (208p) ISBN 978-1-62779-531-9
This urgent historical survey by Engle (Dancing Hands) is ambitious in its scope: to tell the story of the lands now known as the United States through a combination of Hispanic voices and fictionalized composites. Starting with the Native Taíno...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Raúl Colón. S&S/Wiseman, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-5344-5727-0
The creators pay tribute to the torch held high by the Statue of Liberty, and to new arrivals on America’s shores who respond to its call: “The powerful light/ of a mighty lamp/ shines/ for all!” The statue is shown against the blue of the ocean...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by Olivia Sua. Atheneum, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-6659-1871-8
A young Cuban narrator anticipating a family water delivery offers a necessary reminder that water is a resource not freely available to all. “Five days have passed since the water man’s last visit,” and the family is eager to bathe, wash clothes,...
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Margarita Engle, illus. by John Parra. Atheneum, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-6659-3528-9
Focusing on music’s power to heal and uplift, Engle, per an author’s note, reflects on a chapter of her mother’s childhood. In Cuba, young Eloísa finds comfort in music as her mother tries to recover from a serious illness, eating endless bowls of...
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