Newbery Medalist Donna Barba Higuera's forthcoming middle grade science fiction novel, Alebrijes, is out from Levine Querido. Reflecting on the book's genesis, she said, “We’re already talking about AI and putting our consciousness in another form. And so my weird mind wondered, what if you could put your consciousness into a drone.---from the publisher
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The next stunning novel from Donna Barba Higuera, author of Newbery and Pura Belpré Award-winning The Last Cuentista.
This is the story as it was told to me by Leandro the Mighty.
For 400 years, Earth has been a barren wasteland. The few humans that survive scrape together an existence in the cruel city of Pocatel – or go it alone in the wilderness beyond, filled with wandering spirits and wyrms. They don’t last long.
13 year-old pickpocket Leandro and his sister Gabi do what they can to forge a life in Pocatel. The city does not take kindly to Cascabel like them – the descendants of those who worked the San Joaquin Valley for generations.
When Gabi is caught stealing precious fruit from the Pocatelan elite, Leando takes the fall. But his exile proves more than he ever could have imagined -- far from a simple banishment, his consciousness is placed inside an ancient drone and left to fend on its own. But beyond the walls of Pocatel lie other alebrijes like Leandro who seek for a better world -- as well as mutant monsters, wasteland pirates, a hidden oasis, and the truth.
From Donna Barba Higuera, Newbery and Pura Belpré Medal-winning author of The Last Cuentista, comes another novel to astonish us and create a whole new imaginative world, that holds a mirror to our own.---from the publisher
336 pages 978-1646142637 Ages 10-14
Keywords: science fiction, dystopian, brother and sister, survival, accepting others, social issues, 10 year old, 11 year old, 12 year old, 13 year old, 14 year old, intrigue, government, prejudice, social class
Fans of this author's The Last Cuentista will be interested to read this companion novel that follows the fortunes of a young orphan, Leondro, and his sister Gabi as they navigate life in the dystopian future.
This had an odd, vintage science fiction dystopian feel to it; not quite Parable of the Sower or Handmaid's Tale, so that same feeling of darkness and everything being wrong. Maybe Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm? When Leandro's brain gets stored away from his body, it made me think of Pearson's The adoration of Jenna Fox.
There will be a lot of people who like this, but I couldn't give away the ARC of The Last Cuentista, so I will probably not purchase for my school library. Take a look at it and see if it would be right for your population. Mine is better served by something like Oppel's Bloom trilogy. A little more action and less philosophy. There were a lot of words and phrases (in Spanish) that I had to look up because they were not clear from the context, so having a glossary of them would help students who might not have access to computers while reading.
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An orphaned pickpocket must inhabit the body of a hummingbird drone in Newbery Medalist Higuera’s deeply humane postapocalyptic novel set in the distant future. Since arriving in Pocatel, a walled city with a harsh climate and scant resources, 13-year-old Leandro Rivera and his nine-year-old sister Gabi endure a life of arduous physical labor and must frequently engage in petty theft to survive. As Cascabeles, the Latinx-coded descendants of workers from the San Joaquin Valley, Leandro and Gabi must at all times abide by the oppressive Pocatelan Regime’s laws—or else face banishment as well as the deadly wyrms that lurk outside the city. When Gabi is caught stealing a strawberry just before a planned escape, Leandro sacrifices himself in her place. Upon meeting his captors, though, he is offered a reprieve in the form of a task: occupy a piece of tech thought lost to time and find a missing person beyond the city’s borders. Steeped in folkloric ambience and employing delicate character work, this stellar speculative narrative explores themes of identity across circumstance, centering an adolescent without structural power working to protect family and community. Occasional b&w interiors from Álvarez enrich the narrative.---from the publisher
