Olor a perfume de viejita
By Claudia
Guadalupe Martinez
Translated by
Luis Humberto Crosthwaite
Edited by
Sylvia Zeleny
The classic
Latinx growing up story, The Smell of
Old Lady Perfume, now by popular demand in SPANISH!
Claudia Martinez’ novel for middle-grade
readers is a bittersweet story about family, death and the resilient emotional
strength of the human heart. Chela Gonzalez, the book’s narrator, is a nerd and
a soccer player who can barely contain her excitement about starting the sixth
grade. To Chela, her family is like a solar system, with her father the sun,
and her mother, brothers and sister like planets rotating all around him. It’s
the only world she fits in. But that universe is threatened when her strong
father has a stroke. Chela’s grandmother moves in to help the family. The smell
of her old lady perfume invades the house. That smell is worse than Sundays.
Sundays were sad, but death is a whole other thing. In her grief and worry,
Chela begins to discover herself and find her own strength.
Watch Out for Clever Women
¡Cuidado con las mujeres astutas!
By legendary
storyteller Joe Hayes
Illustrations
by Vickie Trego Hill
A Bilingual
Classic—Texas Bluebonnet Master List and Winner of the Southwest Book Award—with
FIVE NEW STORIES. The book includes Joe’s signature story The Day It Snowed Tortillas.
According to an old saying, Una mujer piensa más en un solo minuto que
un hombre en un mes entero—A woman thinks more in a minute than a man
does in a whole month. For me, the saying refers to the rich inner life many
women developed in Western cultures when so much of the external, active life
was denied them. This collection of eleven Hispanic stories celebrates the
strength of women that comes from this thinking.
My hope is that readers will find these
stories spicy enough that they’ll begin to tell them themselves. And if they
do, I invite them to add something from their own imaginations to make the
stories even richer. —Joe Hayes
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