Michael Sedano
Mona Alvarado Frazier. The Garden of Second Chances. Phoenix: Spark Press, 2023.
When the van takes you away to jail you've lost your first chance to remain free. From this point in your now-teenaged life going forward, your career will see continued sinking, or you'll look for a second chance. You make the choice.
Incarcerated youth face that turning point every day they're locked up. Nothing's easy about it. Everything about jail makes it easy to sink, and keep sinking. Nothing about jail makes second chances look to be a good choice. Juana makes the right choices.
Mona Alvarado Frazier wants young adults to know what happens to youths who get locked up, so she's crafted a Young Adult novel, The Garden of Second Chances, to illustrate the punishment visited upon a seventeen year old caught in horrid circumstances.
Juana makes a ton of mistakes that lead her into a tragedy. She's rebellious because she's in love with the father of her baby. Juana buys a fake green card and leaves Mexico to follow the husband to Los Angeles. The husband becomes a monster, a drunken wife-beater. He falls down a stairwell and Juana takes the baby and flees. She's arrested for murdering the husband, convicted and is sitting in that transport van as the novel begins.
Adults reading the novel will find it a page-turner. Frazier loads her narratives with cliff-hangers that she holds back until the following chapter. Fifty-nine chapters make up the book, not a challenging read for most, a couple hours perhaps. But for youth, for example, a weekly literacy class in jail, one chapter a week equals a year's curriculum examining Juana's ongoing crisis. This book would be really useful to such prisoners.
For YA readers, for incarcerated youth, The Garden of Second Chances is what Kenneth Burke terms "literature as equipment for living." A reader uses a narrative to size-up a situation like one's own, examines the character's exigencies and strategies, and decides to reject or adopt behaviors witnessed in the narrative.
Kids in jail have resources to investigate and appeal their cases, Juana discovers. A librarian and an activist prisoner lead Juana to legal procedures and statements of prisoner rights. Frazier quotes procedure manuals in a fashion adults will find heavy-handed, "author's message." Incarcerated youth will find instruction here. "I didn't know you can do this!" can readily become, "I wonder if I can do that here?"
Frazier depicts the lockup milieu as far more than Guard/Prisoner. Juana finds herself torn between numerous conflicts of Us versus Them: Raza v Black prisoners; Crips v Bloods; Sureñas v Norteñas; Paisas v Bangers; Prisoners v Guards; Good Guards v Corrupt Guards; Kids v The System.
The System looms as the unspoken villain of The Garden of Second Chances. The bad guards use the system to deny rights thereby torturing prisoners. The good guards inch their way through roadblocks rather than blaze a trail. It's easier to let a kid suffer than battle some amorphous authority moving at snail's pace. Nothing is urgent to the system, everything is crucially urgent to the prisoner.
There are no miracles. Juana is not saved nor forgiven the mistakes that land her behind bars. Juana acknowledges her errors, without contrition, out of a sense of righteousness tempered by ignorance of law and English. Stuff happened not entirely of Juana's doing. Frazier allows her character a taste of "if only, shoulda, coulda" so readers can pinpoint their own behaviors in hope of avoiding Juana's totally unsuccessful pre-jail decisions.
I can see those jailhouse classroom discussions asking, at what point could Juana have prevented the entire thing?
There are no miracles; there is indomitable courage. Juana is saved. The major consequence of her actions: She is deported after leaving jail. She is reunited with her baby. She is given credit for time served after her legal and procedural research prove decisive. "If she had done this..." becomes a lasting lesson for a kid on the verge of making a bad mistake.
Don't be Juana. If you get busted, find friends, find helpful staff, do your time, it's all yours.
1 comment:
Sounds like a book that belongs in school libraries across the land. Like a book that widens understanding of young people in peril, and helps these young people better understand themselves. In sum: sounds like a book that makes a difference. Thank you for the review, Michael Sedano.
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