Tehlor Kay Mejia: Paola Santiago and the River of Tears (Disney Hyperion 2021)
Paola Santiago is down to earth. She believes that what cannot be scientifically proven does not exist. She is obsessed with space exploration, and events in space have always been more important to her than things on Earth. She often daydreams: for example, how to create rocket fuel from algae. Paola has a difficult nature: she often gets angry. But why shouldn’t she be angry, because there are so many things in the world that can make a person angry. For example, because her father left them. Or because she can’t have such a nice phone like her friend Emma has. Of course, Emma is rich. She lives in the west part of the city, unlike Paola and their other friend Dante, who live in a housing estate called Riverside Palace in the east. The sun even sets earlier there.
One day, Emma disappears from the Gila River bank, which they shouldn’t have gone near since a girl drowned there the year before. Paola’s mother blamed La Llorona, a weeping spirit, for the tragedy, but Paola explained the incident to herself by the hidden currents and the unevenness of the riverbed. What she can’t explain, however, are the nightmares that have haunted her since she was a child. Could they have something to do with Emma’s disappearance? Surely, if she wants to save her friend, she has to believe, not just know…(have to have faith, cleverness alone is not enough)
My favorite element of the story was not the fantasy thread, but the depiction of social and human relationships. Paola and Dante’s lives are not as beautiful as Emma’s, they already know many things about life that children shouldn’t yet know. So they can forgive Emma for having a nice bike and a perfect family.
Tehlor Kay Mejia is an American writer, born in Oregon as a third-generation Mexican-American and currently living there. He considers it very important to represent the Latinx and queer communities in his writing, as he did not have a part in these as a child. He believes that every child deserves to be the hero of a story. Paola Santiago has already been featured in three books.
