Juan Felipe Herrera,
Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found inside a Cereal Box
Harper Collins, Joanna Cotler Books /Tempest, 2005

Ages 12-15

Juan Felipe Herrerra’s Cinnamon Girl is the poetic diary of thirteen-year-old Yolanda Mondragon, an ordinary girl coming of age in extraordinary circumstances. Set in New York City, the first entry is dated 9/19/01 and describes the condition of Yolanda’s beloved Uncle DJ - wrapped in gauze and on a respirator in a New York City hospital. On his way to deliver flowers when the first tower fell, Uncle DJ had inhaled “Twin Towers of dust,” and his prognosis is bleak.

As her uncle struggles, Yolanda watches the same silvery dust settle all over Loisada, the Lower East Side, where she lives in a tenement with her Puerto Rican parents and Uncle DJ and his wife, sleeping on a sofa in the “Everything Room.” In this dust, Yolanda imagines the voices of those who died in the towers as well as the voices from her own troubled past: a past that had brought her family to New York from Iowa only a month earlier, following the death of Yolanda’s best friend.

In an effort to regain control and with the mystical hope that it will somehow save Uncle DJ, Yolanda and her friend Rezzy, a Kuwaiti classmate and another new student at PS 1486, begin collecting the dust, “the voices,” in plastic bags. Meanwhile, Yolanda is also revisiting her correspondence with Uncle DJ from the time she was in Iowa; and is chronicling her current life in poetry.

Seeking sense and stability but encountering ever more chaos, Yolanda strays once again toward trouble and dangerous friends - but not so far that she abandons her letters, her writing, or her quest to save the voices.  It is in this futile quest that Yolanda discovers truths, often unpleasant ones, about herself and about the world.  Eventually, Yolanda realizes she will have to provide her own answers and make her own peace, regardless of what happens to her and around her.  She also learns that she and the family she has criticized are strong enough to make this possible.

In this short, poetic, and concentrated novel, Herrera manages to capture the confusion and turmoil of adolescence both eloquently and accurately. He also shines the spotlight on the particularities of Yolanda’s adolescence, which happens in the context of an immigrant experience, and her clear identification as an outsider in multiple ways. The juxtaposition of Yolanda’s personal tragedies with the tragedies of 9/11 works not only as a personal account of that event but as a brilliant metaphor for the heartache we all encounter on the path to adulthood.