Can magic manta rays protect Milagros and send her all the way north from her Caribbean home to the coast of Maine? Even more challenging, can they send the courageous girl from an island life seemingly set in the time of swashbuckling pirates to a modern-day island without the benefit of a strong time-travel plot device? This first novel is filled with weak links and limp wordplay—the word manta denotes both the sea animal and the protective quilted shawl created by Milagros and Old Woman Perez, an unlikely Mexican seamstress who has also come to live on the small Maine isle. Milagros goes by “Miracle” among English speakers, and miracles do happen, including the magical rescue of Rosa, Milagros’s strong mother, from having to walk the plank on her husband’s pirate ship. Most readers won’t be able to suspend their disbelief, however, even as they might accept the theme of belief in family and one’s own strength and imagination. The novel’s colorful imagery cannot rescue it from its lack of a strong fantasy structure. (Fiction. 9-12)
