Quintero, Isabel. (2014). Gabi: A Girl in Pieces. Cinco Puntos Press: El Paso, TX.
Awards: YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults
Grades: 7th -12th
Pages: 284
Summary: Gabi is a Mexican-American senior in high school that finds poetry to be therapeutic and powerful. Besides dealing with her mom's constant reminders to loose weight, she also carries the load of dealing with her father's addiction, the pregnancy of her friend Cindy, and the coming out of her friend Sebatian. She often argues with her mom for giving her younger brother more freedom only because he's a boy. And just in case the load is not heavy enough, her mom is having a baby! Gabi is having a difficult time being Mexican-American. Gabi is a hardworking student and wants to to attend Berkley and move out when she graduates. Her mom, rooted in her Mexican traditions, wants her to first learn how to do house chores order to find a husband. Cindy writes all types of poems to describe her feelings regarding family relationships, love, self-worth, death, culture, and pains and pleasures of adolescence.
Reader's Response: What I enjoy most of reading this book is the many connections I can make with Cindy. I'm also Mexican-American and being Mexican-American can have its pros and cons, but just like Cindy I learned to take the positive from each ethnicity and make it my own. I enjoy the many words and phrases in Spanish used through out the story, it gave the characters their unique personality. What I appreciate was all the poetry inside this fiction story. For every sweet or bitter event, there was always a poem pair with it, as well as the names of poets and their poems. I actually looked up some that were mentioned in the novel. This is a great novel to let students read autobiographically if they can relate growing up being Mexican American or read vacarious
to look through the window of the life of a Mexican American girl. This book is also a great book to teach fiction and poetry.
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