A Little o.

I have developed a new habit of leaving one book out of my stack. I'll give this one its own post. Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba, by Margarita Engle. (galley proof. I think there were some minor surface errors.) This entire book is told in free verse, which I've not liked in the past, but it worked very well in this book, actually. Bits are also told from the perspectives of several different characters, and I usually find that that doesn't work very well or is poorly executed, but, with the exception of one of the characters (whom we don't hear from very often anyway), this author makes it work also. I wouldn't have liked this book much as a young reader because I always read (both past and present tense there) for information. While this book was about something I had no knowledge of (the large groups of Eastern European Jews who fled to Cuba prior to and during WWII), it did not provide very much information. But the characters are very moving and the language can be quite beautiful. It wasn't for me, but I can see this going over extremely well, particularly with high-low readers.