Gary Soto

Children and teens from all walks of life deal with the dramas of growing up.

Fourteen-year-old Lincoln Mendoza, an aspiring basketball player, must come to terms with his divided loyalties when he moves from the Hispanic inner city to a white suburban neighborhood.

Misunderstanding his wife's instructions, an old man sets out for a party with a door on his back.

Fifth-grader Miata Ramirez is running for class president. Her best friend, Ana, is her running mate. The girls are stunned when they learn they are running against class clown Rudy Herrera and his friend Alex. At first Miata is certain she will win the election. She has big plans to make the school a better place. She'll clean up the graffiti, plant flowers and trees, and get computers. Rudy is confident he'll get the votes by promising longer recess...

Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his listener to a ground-level perspective, recreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes, and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath...

María tries on her mother's wedding ring while helping make tamales for a Christmas family get-together. Panic ensues when hours later, she realizes the ring is missing.

Twenty-five poems about the pleasures and woes that Mexican American children experience growing up.

"A timely new edition of a pioneering work in Latino literature, National Book Award nominee Gary Soto's first collection (originally published in 1977) draws on California's fertile San Joaquin Valley, the people, the place, and the hard agricultural work done there by immigrants. In these poems, joy and anger, violence and hope are placed in both the metaphorical and very real circumstances of the Valley. Rooted in personal experiences--of the poet...