Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box
By Juan Felipe Herrera
Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins, 164 pages, $15.99
"Life is a dream and the dreams are merely dreams," according to a common Spanish saying. When a character in Juan Felipe Herrera's novel "Cinnamon Girl" invokes this phrase, he is quoting his father's final words. The adage can also be applied to much more in this book, for despite repeated tragedies in the characters' lives, they speak of little else than their dreams.
Yolanda, a Puerto Rican-American teenager nicknamed "Canela," or "Cinnamon" in English, is a poet whose best friend, Sky, died in front of her during a prank. Not long afterward, on 9/11, Yolanda's beloved Uncle DJ nearly dies while delivering flowers to the Twin Towers.
The novel itself has a dreamlike quality. Herrera, a poet and author of the energetic and irreverent novel in verse "CrashBoomLove," writes "Cinnamon Girl" as a long poem interspersed with Yolanda's own poems and excerpts from letters between her and her uncle. The form works especially well in sections where Herrera offers a list of evocative images rather than the expected descriptions of 9/11 casualties. As Uncle DJ lies unconscious in intensive care, Yolanda narrates:
All of a sudden, bam! Like the crushed
tower, my throat gets fiery, then empty
in the hospital room--uncle DJ!
I want to shout louder than
the Darth Vader machine. Nada, Nada.
Before 9/11, Uncle DJ's goal was to build a radio station on his roof in Queens and call it RadioSabor, or RadioFlavor. As Yolanda was one of the few people to whom he confided his dream, when DJ is injured, Yolanda decides she must take up the mantle. In a moving scene, she also makes a manda, or promise to the heavens, that if her uncle's life is spared, she will try to gather up as much of the dust covering the area around Ground Zero as possible. Her efforts are probably a metaphor for the bits of detritus filtering through Yolanda's stunned mind.
Unlike some cliched young-adult novels about urban youth, "Cinnamon Girl" does not merely portray disadvantaged teenage victims. Yolanda and her friends do suffer from their circumstances--cramped surroundings, subpar schools and, at times, a racist city--but sometimes they also make unfortunate decisions. In this sense Herrera pulls away from possible pontification and creates believable characters who are both sophisticated and naive.
Only occasionally do the characters devolve into cultural representations. Rezan, or Rezzy, a Kuwaiti classmate of Yolanda's, is generally well-drawn, but in one classroom scene she speaks of her uncle's memories of "Kuwait and the Royals/driving in their Rolls-Royces around the block/spitting nondigestible chocolate until they go crazy." The details are believable, but delivered in one spurt (with a reference to the Persian Gulf War thrown in), they seem a bit overdetermined. In contrast, Rezzy's predicament becomes stunningly convincing when, after 9/11, her family's store is destroyed and they suddenly flee back to Kuwait.
Like Rezzy, most of the characters in "Cinnamon Girl" are in transition. Just prior to 9/11, Yolanda's family moves to New York from Iowa, where her father worked at a chicken-processing plant. In New York they squeeze in with relatives, and Yolanda begins a new school, P.S. 1486. Her mother is physically in transition as well, as she undergoes menopause.
The novel moves around, at times a bit jerkily, from memories of Iowa, to images of Uncle DJ's hospital room, to excerpts from Yolanda's poems and DJ's letters, which she had saved in a cereal box. Though the altered chronology and flashbacks add drama and reflect Yolanda's emotional disorientation, sometimes the story line gets too blurred, and some teen readers might find it a bit confusing.
Spanish phrases appear frequently in the book: sayings (or dichos), terms of endearment and references to cultural traditions. Many are easy cognates; others are funny Spanish amalgams, such as "Loisaida" ("Lower East Side"). A glossary provides translations for some.
Teachers of middle and high school will appreciate this book as an alternative to reading straight non-fiction about 9/11. But even without its insightful view of a historical event, its quirky voice and details are enough to recommend it. Similar young-adult titles of such immediate impact include Virginia Euwer Wolff's "Make Lemonade" series and Benjamin Alire Saenz's novel "Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood."