Red Midnight

Chris Nunez gives 12-year-old Santiago Cruz and his 4-year-old sister, Angelina, distinct yet easy-to-understand Hispanic accents in this story of desperate flight from a burning village in the mountains of Guatemala. The children's escape takes them to a cayuco (a cross between a canoe and a kayak) and a dangerous sail across hundreds of miles of open water to safety on a Florida beach. With luck, ingenuity, and courage, Santiago battles hunger, sleep-deprivation, the terrible sun, the unforgiving ocean, pirates, storms, and even "a river of garbage" as he flees guerilla soldiers who are intent on destroying the descendants of the Mayan people. Based on true stories from the height of the Guatemalan civil war in the 1980s, this is a rousing survival story. Nunez keeps listeners grounded in the face of the intense challenges these youngsters face. M.M.C. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine