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Surviving Santiago
| Title | Surviving Santiago |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2024-10-11 17:01:55 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
Returning to her homeland of Santiago, Chile, is the last thing that Tina Aguilar wants to do during the summer of her sixteenth birthday. It has taken eight years for her to feel comfort and security in America with her mother and her new husband. And it has been eight years since she has last seen her father.Despite insisting on the visit, Tina's father spends all his time focused on politics and alcohol rather than connecting with Tina, making his betrayal from the past continue into the present. Tina attracts the attention of a mysterious stranger, but the hairpin turns he takes her on may push her over the edge of truth and discovery.The tense, final months of the Pinochet regime in 1989 provide the backdrop for author Lyn Miller-Lachmann's suspenseful tale of the survival and redemption of the Aguilar family, first introduced in the critically acclaimed Gringolandia .CCSS-aligned curriculum guidecan be found online at
Review
Surviving Santiago takes the story of a 16-year-old’s love affair and sets it within the dangerous political landscape of the last months of the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile. It a measured, quietly-paced plot woven through tumultuous events. The protagonist is the daughter of an anti-Pinochet activist who reports political misconduct at his radio station and still struggles with the personal demons of an earlier imprisonment. Cristina is Chilean-born but Wisconsin-raised. A young feminist, she finds the summer months of the book’s timeline full of romance, adventure, and challenge among the damp, winter-tropics of her father’s home. Author Lyn Miller-Lachmann gives a complete visual portrait of the city of Santiago, which Cristina (aka Tina) explores on the back of a motorcycle and also under her aunt’s tutelage. The book contrasts and compares this city and its people to the kind but slightly clueless gringos of Madison. Tina’s mother has remarried; her friends smoke marijuana and watch old tv reruns; life is pastel-colored and emotionally safe. It is far more benign than the South American neighborhoods that envelope the main character, and eventually, the readers. (Running Press Teens 2015)
