The Wild Book by Margarita Engle

 

Summary:

Fefa struggles with words. She has word blindness, or dyslexia, and the doctor says she will never read or write. Every time she tries, the letters jumble and spill off the page, leaping and hopping away like bullfrogs. How will she ever understand them?

But her mother has an idea. She gives Fefa a blank book filled with clean white pages. "Think of it as a garden," she says. Soon Fefa starts to sprinkle words across the pages of her wild book. She lets her words sprout like seedlings, shaky at first, then growing stronger and surer with each new day. And when her family is threatened, it is what Fefa has learned from her wild book that saves them.

In this vibrant novel in verse, award-winning poet Margarita Engle paints a glowing portrait of her grandmother as a young girl.

Summary taken from GoodReads.com

Length: 144 Pages (Hardcover)

Source: NetGalley ARC

Publication Date: March 20th 2012 by Harcourt Children's Books          

Today having a learning disabilty is more manageable in a lot of ways but in decades past there was a lot of misconceptions that people had when it came to them. Children who had them were often considered to be stupid and hopeless.

This is the story of author Margarita Engle's grandmother, Fefa. Fefa has dyslexia which was known as "word blindness" at the time she lived. The doctor who her mother had taken her to said that she would never read nor write. However Fefa's loving mother never gave up on her and encouraged her to write.

Now this isn't a biography of her grandmother it's more like a fairy tale type version of her life. I really liked the story and the way it was told and I generally hate books written in poetic verses. It's just one of my pet peeves so I was surprised that this author did a pretty good job utilizing that writing skill especially since this is a childrens book.

I think that the author told the story in a way that is appealing to young readers because it takes place in a different country, a different time and its about a young girl triumphing over her so called "learning disability". I highly recommend it to younger kids maybe 9 years old and up and I think that young girls would especially relate to Fefa's feelings of being an outsider.

*I recieved a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my free and honest review.

★ ★ ★