Return to sender julia alvarez summary1/20/2024 ![]() ![]() However, the teacher’s speech seems to win over the old man too easily. ![]() There is a scene at a public meeting where a teacher confronts an older citizen who is against the undocumented workers. There’s a nice scene in which Mari and her sisters teach Tyler’s grandma about the Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead, and this helps the grandmother to grieve over the loss of her husband who had died a few months earlier.Īlso, I wish this novel would have gone further into why immigrants are unable to immigrate legally. On the bright side, I was happy to see that Mari’s Catholic faith as well as the Christian faith of Tyler’s grandmother are both presented positively. I felt myself pulled out of the story several times during the first half. ![]() Present tense is a very challenging tense to pull off as a writer, and unless it is done extremely well can pull the reader out of the story. Sometimes it seems like we are in Tyler’s head, and other times we are not. Also, while Mari’s letters are written in first person past tense and are easy to read, Tyler’s sections in third person limited with present tense can be very challenging to follow. First, the novel is rather long at over 300 pages and a little slow at the beginning. However, I think this book could be challenging for younger readers. The stories of undocumented Mexican workers in the United States is important to tell, and Alvarez’s novel may help shed some light on this topic. She prays often to the Virgin of Guadalupe to protect her family. From Tyler’s perspective, we see him struggling to understand why his very patriotic family has broken the law in order to hire these three undocumented workers, and from Mari’s perspective, we see what it is like to live in constant fear of being deported. Her name is Mari, and each of her entries is written in the form of a letter, usually to her mother who returned to Mexico when Mari’s grandmother was dying but who has now been missing for many months. The second part of each chapter is written from the perspective of the eldest of those three daughters. As the story opens, Tyler learns that his father has hired three Mexican workers, one of whom is father to three daughters. However, after Tyler’s father is injured in a tractor accident, he is unsure if he can keep the farm going. This means that the reader “follows” the character of twelve-year-old Tyler, whose family has been farming the same land in Vermont for generations. The first part of each chapter is written in present tense from a third person limited perspective. This novel, labeled for ages 8-12, is told from two different perspectives. With recent talk about building a wall between the United States and Mexico, this middle grade novel gives the reader some insight into the hardships some immigrants go through to provide for their families. ![]()
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