Non-Fiction
Solito
Mood
Tense, Intimate
Parental Rating
PG-13
In 1999, nine-year-old Javier Zamora left his grandparents in El Salvador to rejoin his parents in California. The journey was 3,000 miles by bus, boat, foot, and coyote, and it took seven weeks. Solito is written entirely in the present-tense voice of nine-year-old Javier, recounting the strangers who became his surrogate family in the Sonoran desert, the false starts at the US border, the migra raids and detention, and the mother and father at the end of the line who he had not lived with since he was four. Zamora, a poet by training, refuses to layer adult retrospection on the child voice, building a memoir that reads as immersion rather than reflection.
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