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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Apr 2023, 224 pages
Paperback:
Apr 23, 2024, 240 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jo-Anne Blanco
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This gorgeously romantic contemporary novel-in-verse from award-winning author Margarita Engle tells the inspiring love story of two teens fighting for climate action and human rights.
Winged beings are meant to be free. And so are artists, but the Cuban government has criminalized any art that doesn't meet their approval. Soleida and her parents protest this injustice with their secret sculpture garden of chained birds. Then a hurricane exposes the illegal art, and her parents are arrested.
Soleida escapes to Central America alone, joining the thousands of Cuban refugees stranded in Costa Rica while seeking asylum elsewhere. There she meets Dariel, a Cuban American boy whose enigmatic music enchants birds and animals—and Soleida.
Together they work to protect the environment and bring attention to the imprisoned artists in Cuba. Soon they discover that love isn't about falling—it's about soaring together to new heights. But wings can be fragile, and Soleida and Dariel come from different worlds. They are fighting for a better future—and the chance to be together.
Sadly, the publisher was unable to provide an excerpt of this book.
Written entirely in heartfelt, crystal-clear verse, Wings in the Wild takes the reader on a powerful emotional journey with two young people, who, despite the traumas and violence of their experiences, find strength and hope within themselves, joy and solace in their blossoming love for each other, and ingenuity and purpose in their determination to restore the beauty of the natural world being destroyed around them...continued
Full Review
(573 words)
(Reviewed by Jo-Anne Blanco).
In 1893, Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí met for the first time with the exiled general Antonio Maceo Grajales in San José, Costa Rica. Martí, who had spent much of his life in peripatetic exile, had founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party on 10th April, 1892, and Maceo had fought two failed wars fighting against Spain for Cuban independence. The general had been exiled, and granted refuge by Costa Rica, a country that had gained its independence from Spain in 1821 and was sympathetic to the Cuban cause. Maceo and his soldiers were granted land in the Nicoya Province on Costa Rica's Pacific coast and there, with other Cuban exiles, they founded an agricultural colony.
In Margarita Engle's novel Wings in ...
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Censorship, like charity, should begin at home: but unlike charity, it should end there.
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