by Silvio Sirias
The Season of Stories
by Silvio Sirias is a young adult novel that contrasts the lives of two adolescent
characters living four centuries apart. Both live in a time of cultural
collision. Sirias skillfully weaves the two narratives, keeping us interested
in both storylines.
Anayansi is an indigenous teenage princess living in Central
America. Her story begins as their tribal group encounters the arrival of
Spanish conquistadores in the early 1500s. Anayansi soon falls in love with one
of the Spaniards, leading to an inevitable dilemma.
Diego is a sixth-grader in Los Angeles during the early
1960s. Part of an immigrant family from Nicaragua, Diego effectively navigates the
fusion of cultures in Southern California. His mother, however, does not adapt
as well. This leads to the crux of conflict in Diego’s story.
How Anayansi and Diego resolve these challenges reveals much
about their character—and the makeup of those around them. In both stories, the
young protagonists quickly adapt to their new cultural environment while most
of their elders struggle. The novel helps us see that there is hope in this suppleness.
How the stories of Anayansi and Diego are connected is deftly revealed at the novel’s
end.
Silvio Sirias is an author whose decency and compassion
shine through the novel’s central characters. (Moreover, it’s refreshing to
find a contemporary Young Adult novel that foregoes the slick allure of vampires,
wizards or the paranormal.). In The
Season of Stories, Sirias has given us an engaging, tender and uplifting
novel that nurtures the better angels of our nature.
Review by Raul Ramos y Sanchez
No comments:
Post a Comment