Product Description: Every night was routine for Adeline Abigail Adams: dinner at 6, bath at 7, brush teeth at 7:15, and thenit would come out. The GIANT, wooden, hairbrush Adeline detested the most. When Adeline ignores her mothers warning and declares she will never brush her hair again, her curls transform into something quite extraordinar...read more

Product Description: AWARDS: 2008 Pura Belpré Honor Book for Illustration Américas Award, International Latino Book Award, and Christopher Award-winning author. Can you imagine a shipwrecked sailor living on air and seaweed for eight days? Can you imagine a trail of yellow butterflies fluttering their wings to songs of love? Once, there was a little boy named Gabito who could...read more

An introduction to the life and work of the Nobel prize-winning Colombian author describes his childhood in Aracataca, Colombia, and how the things that surrounded him inspired his imagination and his desire to become a storyteller.

An engaging bilingual picture book about migrations combines the wonder of nature with the places we carry in our hearts.

Featuring a bilingual text and fully illustrated in color, this biography of Gabriela Mistral describes the life of a Chilean-born woman who loved words, sounds, and stories, who would grow to become the first Nobel Prize-winning Latina woman in the world.

A bilingual portrait of the 'Queen of Salsa' describes her childhood in Cuba, her musical career, and her move to the United States, and explains how her music brought her native Cuba to the world.

"There's a place for us / Somewhere a place for us . . ." With the emergence of a rich body of literature chronicling the experiences of Latino and Latina gang members, popular understanding of this outlaw culture has advanced far beyond West Side Story. However, the diverse works discussed in this important book-ranging from the breakthrough 1967 memoir Down These Mean Streets and the crime novel Carlito's Way to the play Zoot Suit and the World War II-era historical novel Don't Spit on My Corner, to more recent works such as Always Running/La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. and Chicana gang narratives like Locas and Two Badges-all share with the award-winning musical a crucial discourse on nationality, citizenship, and belonging. In Gang Nation, Monica Brown offers a sophisticated analysis of these narratives produced by former gang members and by "outside" observers writing within the Latino community. She examines the ubiquity of language and behavior within this literature that reveal the frustrated longings within gangs for greater participation in America's national culture and the desire of members to craft an alternative environment in which they are welcome. Through literature and memoirs written from within the culture, Brown illustrates how these youth mimic the rhetoric and rituals of American nationalism's most destructive aspects-intense territoriality, justification of violence, and cultural chauvinism-to assert their citizenship in an alternative nation. Before now, studies of gang culture have centered on either the choices of individual members or the social forces that inspire their unfocused rage. But through Latino and Chicano gang literature, Brown provides a more nuanced portrait of that culture, one that raises broader concerns about dominant nationalism, civil rights, the criminalization of urban youth of color, and the often unfulfilled sense of communal identity and acceptance among American youth. Monica Brown is an assistant professor of English at Northern Arizona University.