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. AGES: 10 to 14 AUTHOR: Margarita Engle is the award-winning author of the Newbery Honor book ‘The Surrender Tree’, as well as ‘The Poet Slave of Cuba’, ‘Tropical Secrets’, ‘The Firefly Letters’ and ‘Hurricane Dancers’. Visit her at www.margaritaengle.com.