10 June 2007 RED GLASS by Laura Resau, Delacorte Press, September 2007, ISBN: 0-385-73466-0

"Sing a song of America

Once she was a young girl with her heart on fire

Born in the dust of the magic of history

It all goes on yeah the dream goes on."

-- Paul Kantner/Marty Balin "America"

"Even before the boy appeared, I thought about the people crossing the desert. I imagined how scrub brush scratched their legs as they walked at night, how the sun dried out their eyes during the day, how their hearts pounded when they threw their bodies to the ground, hiding from la migra. I imagined them pressing their cheeks against the dust, thinking about the happy lives they would have if only they reached the end of the desert."

If there is a book that will provide adolescents with some amazing big-picture food for thought at a time when our elected representatives in Washington, DC are debating what to do in reaction to the presence of millions of undocumented men, women, and children within our national borders, the amazing and heart-stopping RED GLASS is that book.

There is a family unit at the center of RED GLASS which is unlike anything that I -- the suburban Long Island Sixties kid -- grew up knowing:

The narrator is sixteen year-old Sophie, a high school student, who has always thought of herself as a "free-floating one-celled amoeba," minding her own business. She is an adolescent who is full of fears, whether it be germs or cancer or car accidents.

Sophie's mother grew up in England and ran off at 18 with a vagrant backpacker and discovered "when passing through Tucson on the way to Mexico" that she was pregnant with Sophie. She decided to stay in Tucson through the pregnancy and is still there. Before she was born, Sophie's dad "got busted for dealing acid and took off."

Sophie's step father Juan came, illegally, across the desert from Mexico and became legal when he married Sophie's mom nine years ago. He sometimes allows groups of illegal immigrants who have made it across the desert to rest overnight in the family's fenced-in backyard. He always refuses any sort of payment.

Sophie's Great-aunt Dika is from Bosnia. She had gotten married to and divorced from Sophie's mother's English uncle. After Serbian soldiers bombed Dika's house, she was discovered in the ruins and sent to a prisoners' work camp. "After her release, she got political asylum in Germany and worked in a factory there until her visa expired." That's when she called her ex-husband's niece in America -- Sophie's mother -- and joined their family.

Pablo is a five year-old who was accompanying his parents and five other Mexicans who tried to cross the desert. Pablo was discovered -- the lone survivor in the desert -- with Juan's business card in his pocket. With the traumatized boy barely speaking and no relatives claiming him, Pablo becomes an American citizen by default. Juan and Sophie's mother choose to become his foster parents.

"I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate

I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states."

-- Bruce Cockburn, "If I Had a Rocket Launcher"

As a result of Dika's habit of taking Sophie and Pablo with her and sneaking into the pool in the apartment complex down the street, they get to know Mr. Lorenzo -- the pool maintenance man who becomes Dika's sweetheart -- and Mr. Lorenzo's son Angel. The pair are legal residents in America, having been refugees who fled violence, torture, and death in Guatemala.

A year after Pablo's arrival, when the young boy finally begins to speak and provides the name of the village from which he came, relatives are located by telephone. A plan is hatched in which Mr. Lorenzo and Angel will drive Sophie, Dika, and Pablo down to the little boy's village in southern Mexico so that they can visit his relatives, and Mr. Lorenzo and Angel will continue on by bus to Guatemala where they have some unfinished business.

And when things begin to fall apart on their journey, and she encounters a progression of nightmarish situations, it is Sophie's time to face up to all of her fears.

"I felt taller and lighter, as if gravity had nearly disappeared. As if my whole life, I'd let fear cram me into a small box, a space so tiny I was always curled over, my shoulders hunched, my back bent. That box had seemed too strong to break through, so I hadn't tried before. But maybe, all along, the box was just flimsy cardboard, and all I had to do was stand up, punch through the top, and climb out."

RED GLASS is the story of Sophie's pushing out of her box, as well as a story of America today. And I have to take back what I said about Sophie's family unit being unlike anything I'd grown up knowing on Long Island. The fact is that I knew kids in my neighborhood with relatives who had come to America with numbers tattooed on their arms. I grew up with kids who's parents had left Cuba after taking issue with what was going on there. I knew a pair of brothers whose father was from Puerto Rico and whose mother was a German immigrant. And I grew up with my own Sicilian grandmother who had come to this land of opportunity with her own family more than one hundred years ago.

In my recent review of REVOLUTION IS NOT A DINNER PARTY, I wrote of how I might well have been dead if I'd grown up in Maoist China instead of this land of prosperity and constitutional rights. The argument that has been put forward for centuries -- "Now that we're here, shouldn't we shut the gate behind us?" -- continues to rage on today in D.C., in the media, and in towns and cities across America.

RED GLASS will certainly add fuel to the debate over who and why and how many people desiring to come here should be permitted into America, and whether or not we should be building giant walls along our borders.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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