FAR FROM GRINGO LAND

Rick Dresner travels to a very small town in central Mexico to help the Romeros finish their house instead of spending his last summer before graduating from high school hiking in the Colorado Rockies. In Santo Domingo, he feels as if he’s traveled through time to a lost 17th-century colonial town, surrounded by unfamiliar sounds and smells, children who play with beetles as if they were airplanes, dogs that incessantly bark in the evenings and bells that peacefully sound and calm him. With a basic knowledge of Spanish, Rick communicates well enough with the Romeros and feels welcomed. But as the construction—la obra—begins, he feels exhausted. The discovery of an American colony in town puts him in the middle of two contrasting worlds. Using a third-person, present-tense narration and inspired by memories of his own youth, Myers describes Rick’s contradictory feelings. Without bias, the author honestly depicts a rural Mexico that will give young American readers a sense of the good, the bad and the ugly, from the perspective of a young gringo. (Fiction. YA)