Cuba+15

//[[image:cuba_15.jpg]] Cuba 15// by Nancy Osa
Violet Paz, growing up in suburban Chicago, barely knows Spanish, and her dad refuses to talk about his Cuban roots, so it's a real surprise when Abuela insists that Violet have a grand //quinceanero,// the traditional Latina fifteenth-year coming-of-age ceremony. But Violet insists that she is an American. After all, she looks a lot like her Polish American mother. What's more, she wouldn't be caught dead in any onstage ceremony wearing a ruffled pink dress and a tiara. As wonderfully specific as this first novel is to one immigrant family, many teens will recognize the cross-generational conflict between assimilation and the search for roots. Violet's hilarious, cool first-person narrative veers between slapstick and tenderness, denial and truth, as she shops for her party dress, attends a Cuban peace rally, despairs of her dad's values and his taste in clothes, sees that her American friends are also locked in crazy families, and finds the subject for her school comedy monologue in her own wild home, where she is "sentenced to life." (from Booklist)