Margarita Engle

"Los seres alados han de ser libres. Y tambǐn lo han de ser los artistas, pero el gobierno cubano ha criminalizado cualquier arte que no tenga su aprobaci̤n. Soleida y sus padres protestan contra esta injusticia con su jard̕n secreto de esculturas de aves encadenadas. Luego, un hurac̀n derriba las paredes y deja al descubierto el arte ilegal, y sus padres son arrestados...Soleida huye sola a Centroam̌rica y se une a miles de refugiados cubanos...

One hundred years ago, the world celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, which connected the world’s two largest oceans and signaled America’s emergence as a global superpower. It was a miracle, this path of water where a mountain had stood—and creating a miracle is no easy thing. Thousands lost their lives, and those who survived worked under the harshest conditions for only a few silver coins a day.
    

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Offers an account of the first fourteen years of the author's life in poems, telling of her time spent between her mother's native Cuba and her home in Los Angeles, until the revolution in Cuba dramatically alters relations between the two countries she loves.

In early twentieth-century Cuba, bandits terrorize the countryside as a young farm girl struggles with dyslexia. Based on the life of the author's grandmother.

When his mother is sent to jail in Los Angeles, eleven-year-old Tony goes to live with his forest ranger great-uncle in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where Tony experiences unconditional love for the first time through his friendship with a rescue dog.

In Cuba's "special period in times of peace" of 1991, Liana and Amado find love after their severe hunger gives both courage to risk government retribution by skipping a summer of labor to seek food. Told in their two voices plus that of the stray dog that brought them together.

Documents the work of Maria Merian, who lived during the Middle Ages and disproved the theory of spontaneous generation by observing caterpillars as they spun cocoons and emerged as butterflies and moths in the spring.

Lonely Cuban-born eleven-year-old Oriol lives in Santa Barbara, California, where she enjoys caring for injured animals, but her budding friendship with Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature, emboldens Oriol, an aspiring writer, to open up and create a world of words for herself.

In 1920s Cuba, Rima is bullied and shunned for her illegitimacy, but finds solace in riding her horse and forges unexpected friendships with others who share her dreams of freedom and suffrage. Includes historical note.