Tanya Guerrero

audiobook children's middlegrade fiction (8hr52min, or 8h4m at 1.1x speed, performed by my new fave narrator Becca Q. Co, who does all the accents and voices perfectly)
TW/CW: assault/domestic abuse/choking (relatively intense for a middlegrade novel), alcoholic dad

Alba is a ~13 y.o. girl who likes her short haircut and doesn't like girly things, preferring instead to wear a thrifted gray David Bowie t-shirt over pastel shirts and dresses. Her mother sends her to live with her Filipina grandmother in Spain "for a while" while her parents work out some serious issues in NYC, but to Alba it feels as though she is just not wanted. Fortunately her Abuela Lola and kindly neighborhood baker Tony are able to make her feel loved and teach her to bake bread at the same time.

This is super sweet and you will definitely want that tissue box handy--it does get a bit intense toward the later half, as I was not expecting the mother to show up, and then it gets even busier with Tony's bakery needing help -- I think it's not beyond middlegraders to take in and comprehend, and it does eventually come together nicely (though somewhat conveniently, as mentioned by other reviewers) but I might have liked a simpler, shorter story focusing more on Alba's learning to trust people and not run away from them.

Note also that while I appreciate Alba's idea that the bakery offer "pan para todos", if she really intends to serve Celiac customers she'd have to dedicate the whole space to a gluten-free, wheat-free environment as those folks are sensitive enough to react to wheat particles caught in the air (and that stuff gets everywhere). She could probably serve people who are merely gluten sensitive, though just coming up with recipes (that aren't already someone else's commercial property) can be tricky.… (plus d'informations)

A boy with obsessive-compulsive disorder finds ways to face his own fears and be strong for his new foster sister, a little girl with a cleft lip.

I found myself halfway through the book, not really caring about the characters. There were also some weird quirks in the writing -- incomplete sentences, words used oddly, and so forth. It wouldn't have been enough to pull me out of the story on its own, but nothing else was pulling me in. I'm neither Filipino nor OCD, so I can't speak to the representation of those communities, but I had some concerns about the way things were described (lots of "weird" and "alien") and, at least up to the point where I stopped reading, the way Pablo's OCD was handled (there was a lot of mind-over-matter happening). I've read another book by Guerrero and really enjoyed it, so perhaps this debut effort was just not her strongest, but I can't say I recommend it.… (plus d'informations)