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BOOK OF THE MONTH: THE OTHER SIDE BY JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS



The Latina Book Club is proud to announce it's September Book of the Month, THE OTHER SIDE, by award-winning Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos.  
This collection of stories could have been ripped right out of the current headlines.  These are stories that must be read, must be shared.
Happy Reading.




Farrar, Straus & Giroux
You can't really tell what time it is when you're in the freezer.

Fear. Despair. Hopefulness. Reunions. Separations.
Villalobos shines a glaring light on the current immigration and asylum policy in the United States. It's an emotional, gut-wrenching, and vivid portrayal of border-life today.

SUMMARY:  Every year, thousands of migrant children and teens cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The journey is treacherous and sometimes deadly, but worth the risk for migrants who are escaping gang violence and poverty in their home countries. And for those refugees who do succeed? They face an immigration process that is as winding and multi-tiered as the journey that brought them here.
In this book, award-winning Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos strings together the diverse experiences of eleven real migrant teenagers, offering readers a beginning road map to issues facing the region. These timely accounts of courage, sacrifice, and survival—including two fourteen-year-old girls forming a tenuous friendship as they wait in a frigid holding cell, a boy in Chicago beginning to craft his future while piecing together his past in El Salvador, and cousins learning to lift each other up through angry waters—offer a rare and invaluable window into the U.S.–Central American refugee crisis.
In turns optimistic and heartbreaking, THE OTHER SIDE balances the boundless hope at the center of immigration with the weight of its risks and repercussions. Here is a necessary read for young people on both sides of the issue.



Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He has written literary criticism, film criticism, and short stories. Villalobos has penned multiple books, including DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE, which has been translated into fifteen languages and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and QUESADILLAS. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, with his wife and their two sons.



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