Finding Miracles [Audio CD]

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Listening Library
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400094895
• ISBN-13: 978-1400094899
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,159,236 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

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

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

By 

Sarah - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

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.

4 of 4 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
(REAL NAME)   

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.

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