Showing results by narrator "Ana Osorio" in All Categories

Welcome to Seashell Key! Summer is here, and the children of this cozy coastal town are ready to welcome visitors to their little oasis. There’s Mateo, who runs his little kite-making business, Sail and Soar, alongside his dad’s Sky and Sea store; Sasha and Sophia, who comb the seashore next to their mother’s One Stop Shore Shop; and Eli, Ezra, and Elana, who live in the cozy-but-cramped lighthouse and entertain passing tourists with tall tales.

On her first day of school in a brand-new country, a gift from Mexico alights on María’s windowsill: “¡Una mariposa!” And with the butterfly, in comes magic. Filled from her toes to her new butterfly wings with memories of home, María knows exactly who she is. But when everything at school is different and strange, doubt begins to fade María’s confidence away. The place she comes from, the community she loves, the magic inside her … does any of it really belong in her new life in the United States?

What Elisa, Lucia, and Alice see–and judge–of each other from the outside is drastically different from how each girl feels inside. They attend the same classes in the same New York City middle school, but no one knows that Elisa is trying to navigate the bewildering asylum process having just arrived from El Salvador; or that Lucia, who also speaks Spanish and brims with self-confidence, is caught in the middle of her parents’ heartbreaking divorce; or that Alice, who appears to be a rebel in combat boots, carries the burden of her mother’s progressing cancer.