Calvina.

By staff -- Críticas, 9/1/2007

Gr 6+-This year’s winner of the prestigious El Barco de Vapor prize is a mind-bending fantasy about a child whose gender is unclear. The story begins eerily enough when Calvina (or is it Calvino?), accompanied by a large black wolf, confronts a burglar who is breaking into her/his house. The child draws the thief, Lucretio, into an Alice-in-Wonderland world of weirdness where the body of Calvino/Calvina’s deceased mother is being preserved in the refrigerator. Lucretio is later escorted to a strange library populated by literary characters, stealthily alluding at the importance of reading in the electronic age. What keeps this book from becoming a classic is a muddled climax and an epilog that explains everything that has happened in a detached and scientific manner, leaving little sense of wonder. However, it does leave readers with an uncertainty as to whether the events related in the novel happened in the past or are to occur in the future. As the winner of one of the most prestigious awards in Spanish-language children’s literature, this belongs on the shelves of school and public libraries.—Tim Wadham, Youth Services Coordinator, Maricopa Cty. Lib. District, Phoenix, AZ