Xochitl and her family have come from El Salvador and are missing home very much. They live in San Francisco's Mission District and what they miss most of all are the flowers that they were surrounded with back home.
Back in El Salvador, the Flores family was known for the flowers they provided. Xochitl's mother dreams of owning a nursery filled with beautiful flowers and plants. She begins working on her dream by selling bouquets of flowers on the roadside, walking door to door with Xochitl in their new neighborhood. When Xochitl's father finds an apartment with a large garbage-filled yard that, once cleaned, would be perfect for a nursery, the family and the new friends in the community work hard together to make it happen.
This is a beautiful story of community and the power of banding together to make dreams happen. It is a story of how people can work together to bring positive change. It is also the tale of love for a homeland and the homesickness that hits hard at the oddest times. It's about finding your place in the world, of making a home in a new land.
Xochitl and the Flowers is about what most of our parents and grandparents have done; bringing a piece of that culture and homeland left behind and blending it with the new land to make something entirely their own. It's about transcending borders. The book teaches love, home and community, determination in the face of adversity, and how to establish roots.
Prize-winning poet Jorge Argueta has written a timeless, eloquent and moving tale based on real life events in the San Francisco Mission District. The illustrations are colorful and gorgeous like the flowers central to the story. Each page is filled with flowers and smiles and each page made me smile. This is a powerful book and one each of us should have in our shelf reserved for special books.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!