Finding Miracles (Readers Circle) [Library Binding]

Julia Alvarez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2008 | Series: Readers Circle

MILLY KAUFMAN IS an ordinary American teenager living in Vermont—until she meets Pablo, a new student at her high school. His exotic accent, strange fashion sense, and intense interest in Milly force her to confront her identity as an adopted child from Pablo’s native country. As their relationship grows, Milly decides to undertake a courageous journey to her homeland and along the way discovers the story of her birth is intertwined with the story of a country recovering from a brutal history.

Beautifully written by reknowned author Julia Alvarez, Finding Miracles examines the emotional complexity of familial relationships and the miracles of everyday life.


From the Hardcover edition.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 6-9–In spite of her family's openness, Milly Kaufman has never wanted to talk about her adoption. However, during ninth grade, Pablo Bolívar, a refugee from an unnamed Central American country, joins her class and immediately identifies her as someone who might have come from his family's hometown. Then, her grandmother attempts to make a will that differentiates between her and her siblings. While her mother and father's angry reaction makes the woman back down, their increasingly close relationship with Pablo's family makes it impossible for Milly to stop thinking about the parents who gave her up and the war-torn nation she came from. When that country's dictator is deposed in a democratic election, the Bolívars go home to visit and invite Milly along. There she discovers a world quite different from her Vermont home, an extended family, a boyfriend in Pablo, and several possible sets of birth parents. She realizes, too, how much she loves her own family, and they join her for a grand reunion. The strength of this book lies in its description of adoption issues–Milly's feelings of abandonment and difference and her sister's fear that Milly's increased identification as Latina will destroy their close relationship. However, the plot is contrived to help Milly find her identity, and the characters never really come alive. The home country has been stripped of any identifying characteristics that might make the setting interesting. Still, readers interested in this subject will be pleased with the satisfying resolution.–Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Gr. 8-11. Alvarez returns to a familiar theme--the effect of a dictatorship on the citizens of a Latin American country--but half of this story is set in Vermont, where 16-year-old Milly Kaufman tries to come to terms with her adoption as a child from a never-named country. When new student Pablo arrives from their native land, Milly tries to ignore him, but she needs to know her history, so she returns for a visit with Pablo and his family. In some ways this is a blend of fairy tale and horror story. Pablo realizes Milly is from his country because of her unique eyes. Once in her homeland (the lack of the country's name is awkward and annoying), Milly returns to the region where people with her eyes live and finds the elderly woman who remembers all stories: Milly's parents were more than likely revolutionaries. The romantic personal voyage is mixed with the country's history of murders, rapes, and sadness. Alvarez was probably trying to make the personal universal here, but in many places this unwieldy and too long. Effective? Yes, sometimes--but not as much as it could have been. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Library Binding: 264 pages
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1439526605
• ISBN-13: 978-1439526606
• Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,163,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Julia Alvarez has bridged the Americas many times. Born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic, she is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist, author of world-renowned books in each of the genres, including How the García Girls Lost their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Something to Declare. She lives on a farmstead outside Middlebury, Vermont, with her husband Bill Eichner. Visit Julia's Web site here to find out more about her writing.

Julia and Bill own an organic coffee farm called Alta Gracia in her native country of the Dominican Republic. Their specialty coffee is grown high in the mountains on what was once depleted pastureland. Not only do they grow coffee at Alta Gracia, but they also work to bring social, environmental, spiritual, and political change for the families who work on their farm. They use the traditional methods of shad-grown coffee farming in order to protect the environment, they pay their farmers a fair and living wage, and they have a school on their farm where children and adults learn to read and write. For more information about Alta Gracia, visit their website.

Belkis Ramírez, who created the woodcuts for A Cafecito Story, is one of the most celebrated artists in the Dominican Republic.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tale of Milagros (miracles), December 20, 2004

By 

S. Hodge - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Finding Miracles (Hardcover)

Julie Alvarez's ("How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent") newest novel "Finding Miracles" is the story of Milly Milagros Kaufman, a typical all-American, half-Jewish high schooler with a not-so-typical secret: Milly was adopted as an infant from a war-torn Latin American country, where her adopted parents were serving in the Peace Corps. Milly has managed to successfully keep this info from her best friend Em, friends Jake and Dylan, and the community at large, because thinking about her sickly beginnings at an orphanage dredged up too many painful questions about why she was abandoned at the doorstep, who her birth parents may have been and if they "disappeared" during the dictatorship.

Milly is forced to confront her past when Pablo Bolívar joins her grade at high school. Pablo and his parents are refugees from Milly's home country (which is never named). One of his uncles was murdered, one of his brothers is a prisoner, and the other a revolutionary. Pablo asks Milly to help him with English in exchange for practicing Spanish, and one day makes a comment that changes Milly's life: he tells her that her eyes look like those of the mountain village Los Luceros. Also, Milly overhears an angry family discussion in which her unhappy grandmother Happy effectively writes her out of her will as she is not a "blood" relation.

Milly begins to slowly examine her feelings by confronting "The Box," a mahogany box containing her adoption papers, naturalization papers, two locks of hair (one light, one dark), a coin, and several photos, and in a brave speech running for a class office, tells the story of her adoption to the school at large. The second half of the novel chronicles Milly's journey to her homeland. When Milly's home country is freed from tyranny and democracy is slowly put into place, she takes up Mrs. Bolívar's invitation to visit, searching for traces of her shadowy past. Milly and Paco become more than just friends, bonded by the shared sadness of having lost loved ones in the war.

The novel does not have a "fairy tale" ending where everything works out perfectly, but the ending provided a satisfying conclusion to Milly's journey. Realistically written and beautifully described, Alvarez captures a girl torn between cultures, languages, and her past, and how Milly, now Milagros, makes all the pieces fit.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finding Miracles, January 26, 2005

By 

G. Bohannon "joi" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Finding Miracles (Hardcover)

Finding Miracles is a refreshingly original story.
This is the first text that I have read from Alverez and I enjoyed the infussion of spanish in the text and the unpredictable plot. The characters are on the edge of normal but believable. Alvarez takes into account all of the culturaly diverse traits of each character.
The reason I rated the book 4 statrs instead of 5 is that I feel that there are alot of loose ends at the end of the book. Maybe there could be another book.
Joi

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Details were too cliche, September 7, 2009

By 

Rhonda H. Shaw (Fairfax, Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Finding Miracles (Mass Market Paperback)

I read this book because my son had to read it as a summer required book for his English class. He got to page 40 or so and couldn't go further. Like the main character, Milly, he is adopted from a South American country. He found it totally unbelievable that Pablo (the new refugee student) and Milly would become so entwined just because she was born in his native country. I decided to read it myself and I totally understand his disconnect with this book. Vermont is not most of urban America (where we live), so it is hard for him to imagine the fascination with someone who is "different" or a "refugee"---we live amongst many of them---so this just doesn't seem like a big deal. Milly also seemed to make her adoption a secret to many people---it was not clear exactly why she did that when adoption, blended families, etc. are so common and hardly noticed these days. My son commented that the book will make people who are not adopted think that adopted people all have identity crises.

My own thoughts about the book (being a Spanish speaker who has traveled in Latin America) are that the author used just about every possible Latin American history detail and adoption cliche---disappearances, dictator installed by CIA, people pushed from helicopters, curfews, orphanages, baskets with babies left places, overwhelming "need" to find birthparents, right wing death squads, rich landowners, wise old blind lady who lives on a hill with a mute whose tongue was cut out by right wing extremists, etc. etc. ] It gets to be a lot of breadth, but no depth. Not naming a country left it open for using every historical element of all countries. The whole thing is pretty sappy and unbelievable (and maybe that makes it great for teenage girls), but don't read this book if you are a well adjusted teenage boy or an adult who is not trying to learn how to write a book like this.