Author :
Margarita Engle
5th Grade and up
The Surrender Tree
The Surrender Tree, Softcover, Bilingual, Book, Margarita Engle, 5th Grade and up, 9780312608712, $7.99
$333.83 for the Story Collection Pura Belpre Spanish Set, Including 20%-Off, Free Shipping, and No Sales Tax : 2 Hardcover Spanish Book, 8 Hardcover Bilingual Book, 19 Softcover Spanish Books, and 12 Softcover Bilingual Books
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Pura Belpre Award Winning Book in 2009 for Narrative
Who could have
guessed that after all these years,
the boy I called Lieutenant Death
when we were both children
would still be out here, in the forest,
chasing me, now,
hunting me, haunting me . . .
It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not free. People have been rounded up in concentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but with a price on her head for helping the rebels, she dares not go to the camps. Instead, she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her. Black, white, Cuban, Spanish—Rosa does her best for everyone. Yet who can heal a country so torn apart by war?
School Library
Journal : Grade 9 Up—Often, popular knowledge of Cuba begins and ends with
late-20th-century textbook fare: the Cuban Revolution, the Cuban Missile
Crisis, and Fidel Castro. The Surrender Tree, however, transports readers
to another, though no less tumultuous, era. Spanning the years 1850–1899,
Engle's poems construct a narrative woven around the nation's Wars for
Independence. The poems are told in alternating voices, though predominantly
by Rosa, a "freed" slave and natural healer destined to a life on
the lam in the island' s wild interior. Other narrators include Teniente
Muerte, or Lieutenant Death, the son of a slave hunter turned ruthless
soldier; José, Rosa's husband and partner in healing; and Silvia, an escapee
from one of Cuba's reconcentration camps. The Surrender Tree is
hauntingly beautiful, revealing pieces of Cuba's troubled past through the
poetry of hidden moments such as the glimpse of a woman shuttling children
through a cave roof for Rosa's care or the snapshot of runaway Chinese slaves
catching a crocodile to eat. Though the narrative feels somewhat repetitive in
its first third, one comes to realize it is merely symbolic of the unending
cycle of war and the necessity for Rosa and other freed slaves to flee
domesticity each time a new conflict begins. Aside from its considerable
stand-alone merit, this book, when paired with Engle's The Poet Slave of
Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (Holt, 2006), delivers
endless possibilities for discussion about poetry, colonialism, slavery, and
American foreign policy.
Booklist : *Starred Review* As in The Poet Slave of Cuba (2006), Engle’s new book is written in clear, short lines of stirring free verse. This time she draws on her own Cuban American roots, including stories from her grandmother, to describe those who fought in the nineteenth-century Cuban struggle for independence. At the center is Rosa, a traditional healer, who nurses runaway slaves and deserters in caves and other secret hideaways. Her husband, José, a freed slave, also speaks, and so does a refugee child, whom Rosa teaches to be a healer. Then there is the vicious slave hunter known as Lieutenant Death; his collection of ears is an unforgettable image of brutality (“shown as proof that the runaway slave / died fighting, resisting capture”). The switching perspectives personalize the dramatic political history, including the establishment of the world’s first “reconcentration camps” to hold prisoners, as well as the role of slave owners who freed their slaves and joined the resistance against Spain. Many readers will be caught by the compelling narrative voices and want to pursue the historical accounts in Engle’s bibliography. Grades 6-12. --Hazel Rochman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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