Donna Barba Higuera, Newbery Medal-winning author of The Last Cuentista, presents another masterful post-apocalyptic tale woven with Mexican folk traditions in this story of a 13-year-old boy protecting his younger sister from an oppressive regime.
Leandro Rivera and his sister, nine-year-old Gabi, dig papas all day for the unfeeling Pocatelan regime, struggling to earn a potato or two for their only meal. They long to escape, but the siblings, like other Cascabeles--descendants of those who worked the San Joaquin Valley for generations--must never disobey, else face exile beyond the Trench, where hungry spirits roam and giant wyrms hunt. When Gabi is caught stealing, Leandro takes her place as an exile, but a Pocatelan director offers him a choice: she will help Leandro and his sister get out--if he brings back her own banished daughter from the Outlands. Leandro agrees, and the director smuggles his consciousness into what she calls an alebrije, an Old-World hummingbird drone. What Leandro discovers in the desert shocks him. But sharing it with the other Cascabeles will require dismantling the power of fear wielded by the Pocatelans--and convincing a group of other alebrijes to trust in humanity.
Alebrijes is breathtaking. The novel's impeccably detailed world includes startling references to forgotten technology, a brutally unequal civilization ("It's hard watching a mule eat something most Cascabeles could never hope to taste"), and a resilient people devoted to ancestral tradition. Hatred writhes beneath the regime's every twisted adage, like "Abundant fruit comes from pruning the desiccated." After always feeling "too small to fight back," Leandro finds temerity in a much smaller body. A ferociously epic and beautiful middle-grade dystopian novel. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer