FELITA

by Nicholasa Mohr ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 8, 1980

This begins with the Maldonado family preparing to move despite Felita's and her brothers' reluctance to leave their friends. The parents want the new, ""better"" neighborhood and public school for their kids, but before long the family has moved back, driven out by taunts, a beating, and harassment from the new neighbors who don't want any ""spicks"" moving in. Felita's first contact with the new girls, who accept her until their mothers call them home and abruptly turn them round, is too heavily handled, though readers are bound to feel for Felita; and the comments of her mother and her grandmother later on are simply models of the right thing to say. (Basically, the message is ""Don't hate them, love yourself."") Realistically, if anticlimactically, the incident is left behind: the children are happy back on their old block, the parents more or less decide that the kids will be okay as long as they're looked after, and Mohr moves on to more reinforcing experiences. A casualty-free middle-of-the-night fire casts a glow of neighborly togetherness; a school play occasions a temporary rift between Felita and her best friend--and a talk from Grandmother on the value of friendship and the wisdom of making up; and her grandmother's death in the end brings out the note of family love and continuity. For the same reasons that Mohr seems to have written this, libraries will want it; but it hasn't the vitality of Mohr's earlier, older fiction.

Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1980

ISBN: 0141306432

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dial

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION