The authors' candid narrative richly depicts Virginia's passage from a childhood filled with demoralization to a young woman who sees her life through new eyes. Along the way, though, she employs her imagination, persistence, and hard-won wisdom to recover her strength and freedom. Narrating in a singular, authentic voice, Virginia dreams of escape, but her broken identity leaves her directionless. While the living conditions are an improvement over her family's small farm, she endures physical and verbal abuse and is denied an education. As is common for ind gena girls her age, Virginia is sent to live with a wealthy mestizo couple in her case, Ni o Carlitos and his wife, Doctorita and she babysits their children and serves as their maid for eight years. This compelling collaboration between Resau (The Ruby Notebook) and Farinango who met while Resau was teaching English at a community college is based on Farinango's tumultuous upbringing in Ecuador as part of an ind gena (indigenous) family, forced to live under the thumb of the mestizos (the Spanish upper class). I'm the author of the young adult novels The Queen of Water (with Maria Virginia Farinango), Red Glass, What the Moon Saw, The Indigo Notebook, The Ruby Notebook, The Jade Notebook, and the middle-grade novels Star in the Forest, The Lightning Queen, and Tree of Dreams.
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