Return to Sender (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 4–7—Sixth-grader Tyler Paquette lives in a dairy-farming community in Vermont. His father was injured in a tractor accident and must now turn to undocumented Mexican laborers to run the farm. Thus, a trailer on the property soon becomes home to the Cruz family—sixth-grader Mari, her two younger sisters, father, and two uncles, all needing work to survive and living with fear of la migra. They have had no word on Mari's mother, missing now for several months. Tyler and Mari share an interest in stargazing, and their extended families grow close over the course of one year with holiday celebrations and shared gatherings. Third-person chapters about Tyler alternate with Mari's lengthy, unmailed letters to her mother and diary entries. Touches of folksy humor surface in the mismatched romance of Tyler's widowed Grandma and cranky Mr. Rossetti. When "coyotes" contact Mr. Cruz and set terms for his wife's freedom, Tyler secretly loans the man his savings, then renegotiates a promised birthday trip in order to accompany Mari to North Carolina to help rescue her abused mother. When immigration agents finally raid the farm and imprison both Cruz parents, it signals an end to the "el norte" partnership, but not the human connections. This timely novel, torn right from the newspaper headlines, conveys a positive message of cooperation and understanding.—Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT
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From Booklist

With quiet drama, Alvarez tells a contemporary immigration story through the alternating viewpoints of two young people in Vermont. After 11-year-old Tyler's father is injured in a tractor accident, the family is in danger of losing their dairy farm. Desperate for help, Tyler’s family employs Mari’s family, who are illegal migrant Mexican workers. Mari writes heartrending letters and diary entries, especially about Mamá, who has disappeared during a trip to Mexico to visit Mari's dying abuelita. Is Mamá in the hands of the border-crossing “coyotes”? Have they hurt her? Will Homeland Security (la migra) raid the farm? The plot is purposive, with messages about the historical connections between migrant workers today and the Indians’ displacement, the Underground Railroad, and earlier immigrants seeking refuge. But the young people’s voices make for a fast read; the characters, including the adults, are drawn with real complexity; and the questions raised about the meaning of patriotism will spark debate. Grades 6-9. --Hazel Rochman

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 9-12
  
• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers (January 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375858385
• ISBN-13: 978-0375858383
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #63,114 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Richie's Picks: RETURN TO SENDER, February 22, 2009

By	Richie Partington "http://richiespicks.com" (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

To the parents of eleven-year-old Tyler Paquette, the family of Mexican workers who have come to live in the trailer on their Vermont dairy farm are angels.

Tyler had actually seen the tractor roll over, trapping his father underneath. He's had horrible nightmares about it ever since. If Tyler had not been there to call 9-1-1, his father wouldn't be alive today. Nevertheless, his father may never recover the full use of his arm and leg and -- given that Tyler's big brother is heading off to college at the end of the summer and his teenage sister is about as likely to help with the cows as my teenage daughter is to help me tend to my dairy goats (NOT!) -- it had been looking like Tyler might never have the opportunity to grow up to become a fifth-generation Vermont family farmer.

"I remember the fear of serpents, the sharp rocks, the lights of la migra. And always, the terrible thirst...I am not sure even this paper can hold such terrifying memories."

Mari is Tyler's age. She is an illegal alien. She has arrived on a bus from North Carolina with her illegal alien father, her two illegal alien uncles, and her two little sisters who were born in North Carolina. Last winter Mari's mom suddenly returned to their homeland in southern Mexico because her mother -- Mari's Abulita -- was dying. Now the family has lost contact with Mama who is hopefully still alive and presumably still trying to sneak across the border and return to North Carolina.

Fearing potential repercussions, Mari's father has persuaded her not to try to actually mail any of the long letters that she has been writing to Mama. But how, then, might the family ever become reunited?

"That is why I am writing, Mama. Not only to tell you where we are moving to, but also because I have nowhere else to put the things that are in my heart. As you always used to tell Papa when he found you writing letters, or just writing in a notebook, 'El papel lo aguanta todo.' Paper can hold anything. Sorrows that might otherwise break your heart. Joys with wings that lift you above the sad things in your life."

Told from the perspectives of Tyler and Mari -- two sixth graders living on a dairy farm in small town Vermont in 2005 -- RETURN TO SENDER is a story of families and hope and opportunities offered by the country I love and am sometimes so proud of -- and opportunities withheld by the country I often haven't understood and have sometimes been embarrassed by.

Why is it that it is a crime for one of these sixth graders to have been born in Mexico? How will it affect things for Tyler to be classmates with Mari, to be in the position of knowing Mari is an illegal alien and -- at the same time -- to recognize that his future as a farmer is so dependent on keeping knowledge of that legal status well hidden? When is it okay -- even admirable -- to participate in breaking laws and when have American heroes participated in doing so?

On the lighter side, RETURN TO SENDER frequently plays with language -- illustrating repeatedly how literal translations of English to Spanish or Spanish to English can lead to amusing misunderstandings.

Just in the past couple of weeks, I have perceived a heightening of fear-based anger related to the economic woes facing so many of us. During an era of panic and fear, a book that so vividly and lovingly illustrates how diverse families are far more similar than they are are different is particularly welcome and essential.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A timely book for young people (and the not-so-young, August 4, 2009

By	C. E. Selby - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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I want to disclose that I know the author, but only slightly, and I lived for many years in both Middlebury and Bridport, Vermont. (Bridport is often called Bridgeport by out-of-staters passing through.) So when I see an acknowledgment to Jerry and Cheryl Connor, who own a large and beautiful farm in Bridport, I know I am in once familiar territory. But those were years ago. Today I live in Miami Beach where Spanish dominates English. So let me begin by saying one of the biggest pluses is how skillfully Dr. Alvarez has incorporated Spanish into the text. It reads so smoothly and should be very inviting to those who do not speak Spanish. And in my opinion, Spanish is a beautiful language to hear. (I also teach writing at a local college. Many of my students speak Spanish as their first language, so unlike what my classrooms were like in Vermont.)
The characters are delightful. When I grew up in Vermont, it was French-Canadians who populated the migrant farm workers. Maybe today there are more Mexicans. This I would not know. But the story is believable and takes the reader through the complete annual cycle of a farm.
However, I could not give this the fifth star for one reason. I have taught all my adult life. Maria's letters are not the letters of a girl her age. I think children and young adults reading this would not object. But as an adult reader--and a voracious one--I don't like having to suspend my belief system for an entire novel. And that is what I had to do because those letters back home to the absent mother in Mari's life are too perfect, letters that a more mature Mari would have composed. Having said that, I realize that the standards for young adult fiction are different than those for adult fiction.
I really wish this book would find its way into hundreds and hundreds of classrooms, probably grade six through eight. This really is a political book--and I am pleased it is.
Now I am wondering if Dr. Alvarez might be writing, say, about a young girl, born in Puerto Rico, who grows up in Brooklyn and becomes a latina woman on the Supreme Court. I might change my mind about young adult Sonia Sotomayor's letters to someone. I suspect she would have written brilliant prose and lengthy too.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Look into the Heavens, March 26, 2009

By	Walt Eddy (Layton, Utah) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Julia Alvarez knows how to characterize the blur in the line between right and wrong. She knows how to make it clear that reality and morality are continuums and not dichotomies of this or that, up or down, or yes or no. There are no absolutes. (Now, there's an oxymoron.) We have a long way to go.

Alvarez begins with a young man, her protagonist, Tyler, the younger eleven-year-old son in a family who has survived and thrived by running a dairy farm in Vermont. The family's farming heritage is at risk. Tyler's older brother is away at college, mostly unavailable to help out on the farm without jeopardizing his education and eventual career, and Tyler's father has been injured and disabled, perhaps permanently, in a farming accident. Tyler's father can't do the work he normally did. It is unclear when and if he ever will be able to do the work again. Extended family also can't adequately help out. So paying the bills and keeping the farm is at risk. The family needs help or to change their dynamics: selling the farm, moving from their land, doing something entirely different than farming.

Tyler's parents eventually hire undocumented immigrants --- a couple of men --- to assist with the dairy work. One of the immigrant men is married and has three daughters. The oldest, Mari, slowly becomes Tyler's friend and ally, an unfolding as miraculous as springtime. Mari's mother has disappeared in the murky criminal element that arose to fulfill the void created by ambiguities in United States immigrant policies, underfunded policies that for years tacitly approved of undocumented immigrants coming to the United States to work in jobs that citizens in better times didn't want to do.

The analysis of various notions is tenderly at play in Alvarez's book:
What is a family?
What does it mean to be honest?
What good is it to have a law without compassion, or without implementing it and adequately funding its substantial enforcement?
What does it mean to be a good neighbor and a friend?
What sacrifices are appropriate and necessary of good neighbors and friends? And does all of that that apply only to individuals and not to communities and to nations?
What is charity? Is it a weakness or strength?
What about religion and the mystical, and gazing into the heavens? Hope?

"... life is about change, change, and more change. 'When you're born as a child, you die as a baby. Just like when you're born as a teenager, you die as a child.'... 'But there are good sides even to bad or sad things happening,' my mom reminds me...."

This is a coming of age adventure where a boy and a girl have more love and compassion than the men and the women do, where a couple of families have greater diplomacy toward each other than the greatest nations on earth do for each other. So it would be good to take their advice and look into the heavens and contemplate the beauty of the night before flying apart.

Not just one star but five.