By Pam Muñoz Ryan
A wealthy Mexican girl loses everything and must start over as a farm laborer in Depression-era California.
Esperanza Ortega has grown up like a princess on her family's ranch in Mexico, with silk dresses and servants and a papa who adores her. Then, on the night before her thirteenth birthday, everything is taken: her father is killed, and she and Mama must flee to California with almost nothing, where they live in a labor camp and pick crops for a few cents an hour. Esperanza has to learn to sweep, to mind babies, to work, and to swallow her pride, all while the Great Depression makes life harder by the week and Mama falls dangerously ill. It's a rags-from-riches story with a proud, prickly heroine who has to grow up fast, and it's as much about hope and hard work as it is about loss.
This one asks a little more of your child than the books before it: it's longer, the feelings run deeper, and the history (the Great Depression, Mexican farm workers, the beginnings of labor strikes) is woven right through the story. Muñoz Ryan makes it carry, though, because Esperanza is so real, proud, spoiled, and then slowly, believably brave. A child who's ready to sit with a heroine who loses everything and rebuilds will find this deeply satisfying, and it opens a window onto a part of American history that many books skip.