Reviewed by Natalie Tsang for TeensReadToo.com
Laura Resau's RED GLASS was an amazing read. It's a wonderful mixture of excerpts from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's THE LITTLE PRINCE, eccentric people, political unrest, and magical fortunes folded into a cross-continental summer road trip.
Sophie is an amoeba, a free-floating spirit who is not attached to anything besides her family and her books. Then one night she picks up a phone call from the hospital. Seven Mexican migrants and their guide have died crossing the Arizona border. The lone survivor is a six-year-old boy named Pablo who had Sophie's stepfather's business card in his pocket. Pablo comes to live with Sophie, her parents, and Sophie's great aunt Dika, a Bosnian war refugee. Sophie grows to love her Principito, or Little Prince, but after a year her parents get in contact with Pablo's remaining family in Mexico.
Over the summer, Sophie, Dika, Dika's boyfriend, and his son must take Pablo back to his hometown so that he can choose between his new family and his birth family. The trip is hard at first, because Sophie is afraid that anything and everything will go wrong. But the stories and the struggles of her companions change her perception of danger and she grows attached to Ãngel despite her fears that she will lose him. When a terrible accident occurs, Sophie is forced to make a dangerous trip by herself. On the way, she realizes that while life has its risks, it is still beautiful and even fun.
I loved this book. One of the things that was really well done was how it was multi-cultural without being culturally exclusive. Even though some of the dialogue was written in Spanish, it was still easy to read. But the best part of the book was its characters. They are both hilarious and tragic, but never melodramatic. At times, I felt as if author Laura Resau was in my head. Teens will identify with Sophie as one of their own.
Laura Resau's RED GLASS was an amazing read. It's a wonderful mixture of excerpts from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's THE LITTLE PRINCE, eccentric people, political unrest, and magical fortunes folded into a cross-continental summer road trip.
Sophie is an amoeba, a free-floating spirit who is not attached to anything besides her family and her books. Then one night she picks up a phone call from the hospital. Seven Mexican migrants and their guide have died crossing the Arizona border. The lone survivor is a six-year-old boy named Pablo who had Sophie's stepfather's business card in his pocket. Pablo comes to live with Sophie, her parents, and Sophie's great aunt Dika, a Bosnian war refugee. Sophie grows to love her Principito, or Little Prince, but after a year her parents get in contact with Pablo's remaining family in Mexico.
Over the summer, Sophie, Dika, Dika's boyfriend, and his son must take Pablo back to his hometown so that he can choose between his new family and his birth family. The trip is hard at first, because Sophie is afraid that anything and everything will go wrong. But the stories and the struggles of her companions change her perception of danger and she grows attached to Ãngel despite her fears that she will lose him. When a terrible accident occurs, Sophie is forced to make a dangerous trip by herself. On the way, she realizes that while life has its risks, it is still beautiful and even fun.
I loved this book. One of the things that was really well done was how it was multi-cultural without being culturally exclusive. Even though some of the dialogue was written in Spanish, it was still easy to read. But the best part of the book was its characters. They are both hilarious and tragic, but never melodramatic. At times, I felt as if author Laura Resau was in my head. Teens will identify with Sophie as one of their own.
