Category: Young Adult/Teen Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN-10: 1430321199
Type: Fiction
Pages: 272
Copyright: October 6, 2007
Retelling of the Alice in Wonderland story set in Latin America.
Victoria and Alfredo move from the city to a Latin version of Wonderland and produce a juice called Liquid Passion that provokes unusual reactions in its consumers. Their twelve-year-old daughter, Honey, has a hummingbird living in her ear and possesses magical powers. Hungry for a story, an investigative reporter named Rigby Sloane, shows up and launches an international media frenzy. Honey and her pre-teen nemesis, John Firestarter,escape the chaos on her parents' farm and begin an underground journey, through an armadillo hole, on a quest to restore balance in the lives of their immediate families.
Excerpt
Until she was almost twelve, Honey had a peaceful and happy life with her parents on a farm that cultivated vast orchards of passion fruit. There were always open fields in which to run and trees to climb, and the healthy food and fresh air gave her skin a luminous glow that caused the country folks to murmur about her in awe.
“The Passion-fruit Princess,” they called her.
However, Honey was an only child and her parents home-schooled her, so by the time she was nearly a teen, she felt the ache of loneliness for the first time. Her stomach and heart throbbed with a pain she could not explain. She walked down the stairs of her solitary white house that was surrounded by a vast field of yellow and green grasses. She paused to listen for a few minutes to a noise coming from her living room. It sounded like the drone of a small engine. Honey nervously hesitated before facing the creature that had invaded her home, as typically an uninvited visitor from the fields and woods could be a bat, a ground owl, a lost armadillo, or a deadly coral snake.
“Who’s there?”
Honey had been raised on the country’s local folk legends about the creatures that lived in Wonderland: worms the size of snakes, and snakes longer than laundry lines. Her mother, Victoria, repeated stories of local sightings of flying saucers and giant glowing phosphorescent dogs: as big as houses. It was said that these dogs roamed the fields at night and drank out of the lakes until they ran dry. Honey accepted all of these stories as fact, but then again, she knew no other life but this.
“Beware of the child-eater,” her mother had whispered. “She looks at first like a gypsy woman, but it’s only a disguise. Underneath, she’s a ravenous beast who gulps down children and stores them whole and undigested in her crowded belly.”
“Are you harmless?” Honey cautiously directed her voice at the strange noise in the next room.
Honey took a deep breath and walked towards the window. However, to her relief, this creature was not an invader, but a lost guest. It was a turquoise and green hummingbird who had approached the house to refresh himself at the feeder, but instead had flown in through a small open window and could not understand why the glass of the large bay window was not yielding for him. He drilled against it frantically, buzzing like a toy plane. As Honey approached him, his heart beat so rapidly from fear and exertion that it caused the green feathers on his chest to ripple.
Honey spoke to the hummingbird to calm him down.
“Don’t worry, pretty thing. I want to help.”
He opened his needle-like mouth, and to Honey’s surprise, an iridescent soap bubble escaped his tiny beak. The bubble expanded, swelled, and rose in the air. When it popped, his words tumbled to the ground. They expressed themselves in disarray.
“How… To help…Me?”
“Jump into my hand, and I’ll take you outside.”
Another bubble rose from his mouth. Honey followed it with her eyes as it grazed the ceiling. This time, the words rained down on pieces of cardboard. Honey chased after them and reassembled them like giant playing cards.
“What… If….I…Want Something Else?”
Honey blinked and read the cards again. “What do you want from me?” Honey asked the hummingbird. He flew around her twice and then landed on her arm. She walked out the door. “Don’t you want to fly?”
This time, he gave up on words and sent her a direct thought.
“You smell sweet and good. I could be your friend forever.”
“How?”
The hummingbird flipped from her arm like a diver and soared into the air. Then he changed direction and flew into her ear.
Honey’s entire body shook and her ear itched madly as the tiny creature burrowed its way deeper into her ear canal. She let out a scream and fell to the grass. Then instead of pain, she felt an overwhelming sense of warmth and calm. She inhaled deeply and smiled at the sky.
“If you let me stay, I will never, ever leave you,” he whispered. His twittery voice echoed inside her head. “I’ll be the one in whom you can trust and confide. I’ll be your guide through all that is good and bad in life. You’ll never be lonely again. Do you want that?”
“I want a friend like you,” Honey said. She blew an air kiss that made a smacking noise, and the air filled with the vaporous smell of hot cotton candy. The ache she had felt earlier in her stomach had mysteriously subsided.
Professional Reviews
By Susan Henderson
"Jennifer Prado's, Latina in Wonderland, is rich with unforgettable images: a child whose presence is known to her parents before she is conceived, a passion fruit orchard steeped in magic, a young girl who smells of honey and has a hummingbird living in her ear, a mother who grows nearly bald with worry for her child.
But even magical worlds carry problems like our own, where loving parents wonder if it's best to warn their daughter of the world's dangers--its child-eater, its nearby city where people are trapped in cubicles, staring into screens--or to shield her from such concerns.
When the outside world encroaches, this bold young girl journeys deep into a hole in the ground to defend the strange but simple life she loves. Latina in Wonderland gives us faith that wrongs can be righted, that "bad" people can become "good," that the true magic of Wonderland is something we all have at our fingertips."
--Susan Henderson, Editor/Producer of LitPark.com and author of the forthcoming novel: Tap Root (St. Martin's, 2009.)
By Ellen Meister
"Jennifer Prado spins words into magic in this original and enchanting take on the Lewis Carroll classic. Her vibrant characters swept me along on their fantastical journey, leading me up from birth, down through an armadillo hole and back to Wonderland, with lessons on love for each other and respect for nature along the way."
--Ellen Meister, author of Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA, (William Morrow, 2006)
By Phoebe Kate Foster
"Jennifer Prado's, Latina in Wonderland, is rich with unforgettable images: a child whose presence is known to her parents before she is conceived, a passion fruit orchard steeped in magic, a young girl who smells of honey and has a hummingbird living in her ear, a mother who grows nearly bald with worry for her child.
But even magical worlds carry problems like our own, where loving parents wonder if it's best to warn their daughter of the world's dangers--its child-eater, its nearby city where people are trapped in cubicles, staring into screens--or to shield her from such concerns.
When the outside world encroaches, this bold young girl journeys deep into a hole in the ground to defend the strange but simple life she loves. Latina in Wonderland gives us faith that wrongs can be righted, that "bad" people can become "good," that the true magic of Wonderland is something we all have at our fingertips."
--Susan Henderson, Editor/Producer of LitPark.com and author of the forthcoming novel: Tap Root (St. Martin's, 2008.)
"Jennifer Prado spins words into magic in this original and enchanting take on the Lewis Carroll classic. Her vibrant characters swept me along on their fantastical journey, leading me up from birth, down through an armadillo hole and back to Wonderland, with lessons on love for each other and respect for nature along the way."
--Ellen Meister, author of Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA, (William Morrow, 2006)
"Latina in Wonderland is wildly imaginative, magical and mystical. Full of haunting imagery and graced with memorable characters that are both fanciful and believable, it stands head and shoulders above the usual Young Adult fare. Jennifer Prado has created a marvelous world of possibilities and perils, skillfully drawing us into its mysteries and imparting gentle wisdom as we follow Honey on her odyssey. This is a book for readers of all ages, transcending the limits of its genre and becoming a parable rich with insight and timeless truth."
--Phoebe Kate Foster, Assistant Editor of The Dead Mule.com and former Editor of PopMatters.com.
It's 1969 and some high school students in a small town decide to oppose a war that makes no sense and promises to set their lives on a different path against their wishes.
