This story seamlessly weaves two culturaswhile letting each remain intact, just as Miguel is learning to do with his own life. Eventually, Tía Lola and the children swap English and Spanish ejercicios, but the true lesson is 'mutual understanding.' Peppered with Spanish words and phrases, Alvarez makes the reader as much a part of the 'language' lessons as the characters. She can also cook exotic food, dance (anywhere, anytime), plan fun parties, and tell enchanting stories. Tía Lola, however, knows a language that defies words she quickly charms and befriends all the neighbors. The last thing Miguel wants, as he's trying to fit into a predominantly white community, is a flamboyant aunt who doesn't speak a word of English. When Tía Lola arrives to help the family, Miguel and his hermana, Juanita, have just moved from New York City to Vermont with their recently divorced mother. Renowned Latin American writer Alvarez has created another story about cultural identity, but this time the primary character is 11-year-old Miguel Guzmán. Like the story, the paintings are both hopeful and somber, and the slaves are as graceful and softly luminous as the slave owners are stiff, pinched, and cruel.Ī dreamy, powerful picture-book tribute to both Hamilton and the generations-old story. When a mother and her baby are brutally whipped in the cotton fields, an old slave resurrects his magic and helps her and others fly away, free as birds, leaving the non-magical slaves behind to tell the tale. Legend has it that some people in Africa could fly, but when they were shipped to America as slaves, they shed their black, shiny wings (reflected as feathers on the glossy black endpapers). Hamilton’s The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1985) won a Coretta Scott King Award, and the Dillons here reissue its heartbreaking title story with gorgeous, all-new, full-color paintings. And they would walk up on the air like climbin up on a gate.”

Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic.

The people could fly picture book