Secrets of the Casa Rosada

Starred review from September 1, 2018
A magical story about a girl who awakens to her potential when her vagabond mother abandons her at her grandmother's home in Laredo, Texas.Kept in the dark her entire life, 16-year-old Martha discovers that everything she thinks she knows about herself is a lie. Evicted time and again while on the road with her mother, her life was nomadic and impoverished. Thrown into her grandmother's Spanish-speaking world, she discovers that her last name is Gonzalez rather than George and that she has a large family. As Martha endeavors to learn the language of her long-lost family, she discovers that her grandmother is a curandera with healing powers. Engaging in practices that are a fusion of Indigenous beliefs and Catholicism, Martha finds her confidence. But as she becomes determined to uncover her mother's secrets, she is thwarted by the way her family is reluctant to talk about the past. When she develops a mortal enemy at school, she must decide whether to back away or fully immerse herself in her grandmother's curandera teachings. Debut novelist Temblador has created an unforgettable character in Martha, a girl whose gifts are greater than she could have imagined, in part because they belong to a world she never could have imagined. The novel introduces young readers to a Mexican community that maintains its roots in its Indigenous bloodlines.A suspenseful and fascinating glimpse into a Mexican-American world. (Fiction. 13-18)

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November 1, 2018
Grades 9-12 Martha's life was anything but stable for 16 years, since they travelled all over whenever her mother's whims sent them to a new place. But being abandoned at her mother's childhood home with the abuela she never knew she had offers a whole new kind of instability. While dodging the class bully and learning Spanish to fit in, Martha also starts to practice curanderismo, a mystical healing practice her abuela specializes in. But her family's full of secrets, and deep down, she wants to know where her mother went and why she left Laredo in the first place. Temblador depicts Martha as a frustrated teenager who loves and respects the people around her while finding a newfound feeling of purpose and belonging when she assimilates into her community as her highly respected grandmother's apprentice. This book is accessible to readers who don't speak Spanish, since Martha also can't speak any at the beginning of the story. It also addresses the hard reality that nobody is perfect, even our guardians, and the slightly ambiguous conclusion is tantalizingly open to interpretation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)