Customer Reviews

Ximena at the Crossroad (Secret Weavers Series)

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Ximena is the young daughter of a wealthy couple living on an hacienda in the highlands of the Andean mountains of Peru. Her parents shelter her and pamper her, providing her with education, a safe home, and loving care. She seeks knowledge of anything outside the realm of what her parents allow, often resorting to pictures, conversations, observations, and stepping outside of the physical boundaries imposed upon her by her parents.

XIMENA AT THE CROSSROADS succeeds at so many levels. The chapters work as a developing novel or simply as short stories. Each is beautiful in its own right. There is variation in tense and person as the novel progesses. At one point, with the use of second person, the reader is taken into the novel itself and becomes Ximena! The story reveals how differences among people affect one child. There is a sense of the uneven way in which a child learns about the world through observation, pictures, stories, and conversations--often fusing fact with fantasy--and how fragmented the input is, always colored or filtered by what adults keep secret from a child. The message of social injustice becomes clearer toward the end of the novel as Ximena becomes directly involved in a dangerous situation. For a colorful and lush novel about a child's learning about her world, this is a novel not to be missed.