Armando and the Blue Tarp School, Del Sol Books

Author : Edith Hope Fine and Judith Pinkerton Josephson, Illustrator : Hernan Sosa
Kindergarten - 3rd Grade

Armando and the Blue Tarp School

Armando and the Blue Tarp School, Hardcover, English, Book, Edith Hope Fine and Judith Pinkerton Josephson, Hernan Sosa, Kindergarten - 3rd Grade, 9781584302780, # 10134h, $16.95

Armando and the Blue Tarp School Paterson Prize for Books for Young People
Children's Books of the Year, Bank Street College Children's Book Committee
Skipping Stones Award, Skipping Stone Magazine
Lasting Connections, Title Book Links
"Choices", Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
Editor's Favorites, The Bloomsbury Review
San Diego Book Awards, Picture Book Winner

An artistic young Mexican boy living in a colonia (trash dump community) takes the first steps toward realizing his dream of getting an education. Based on the work of David Lynch, a teacher from New York who first began working in a colonia in Mexico in the early 1980s.

Buh-beep! Buh-beep! A truck horn sounds through Armando’s colonia, his neighborhood, near the city dump. Señor David is back, setting up school on a blue tarp spread on the ground. Oh how Armando longs to go to this school, but he knows he must help his father pick through trash in the dump for things his family can use, recycle, or sell.

When Armando’s parents decide at last to let him spend afternoons at Señor David’s school, Armando is overjoyed. He’ll learn to read and write. He’ll learn numbers. Best of all, he’ll draw pictures. And one momentous day Armando’s love of drawing helps bring an almost unimaginable treasure to the children of the colonia.

Told with honesty and hope, Armando and the Blue Tarp School is a testament to the pursuit of dreams and the power of one person to make a difference in the lives of others.

"This affecting tale—of a plein-air schoolroom in a deeply impoverished neighborhood populated by pepenadores (trash pickers)—springs from the real deal. Fine and Josephson have taken the story of David Lynch, who first went to Mexico in 1980 to teach children living in the Tijuana city dump, and fashioned it into a picture book. Fictional, yes, but only marginally so. Their story pivots around Armando, who scours the dump with his father all day long for anything of worth, and his thirst to join the classroom: a blue tarp on the bare ground. Though Armando’s income is vital to the family, his parents come to understand that only an education will allow him to eclipse pepenadore life. The simplicity of the story is what lets it run deep, its bite of realism; no sermons are being delivered here, just a door thrown open to life under reduced circumstances (though Sosa’s artwork, with its look of leaded glass, conveys a benevolent quality to the proceedings). Without patronizing, Señor David defines the essence of humanitarianism, while the pepenadores, ever searching for beauty in the beast, find gold—and prize it." –KIRKUS REVIEWS

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