Review | YOUR HEART MY SKY by Margarita Engle
Atheneum Books for Young Readers | Release Date: March 23, 2021
It’s summer 1991 in Cuba during el período especial en tiempos de paz. The government has claimed the time to be a period of peace while many Cubans struggle to find enough food to survive. Love, joy, and dreams seem to be frivolous and reckless during these times while foraging for food in the sea is a time-consuming daily source of sustenance. Yet, two teenagers come across one another after refusing to go to a camp where they’d volunteer labor for the government.
Written in three points of view, a dog, a boy, and a girl, the verse of YOUR HEART MY SKY is sparse as each poem almost feels like a sacred spare breath in a time where exertion of energy must require the utmost of importance. The poems are short, gentle, and economically vulnerable. A stray dog has a mind of its own as a trickster, a spotter of potential, and a catalyst for young love between teenagers Liana and Amado.
The two grow together as they learn to cultivate the land, allowing the reader to experience love in its most fundamental way—no starlit movie theatres, no video games, no road trips. Instead Amado and Liana survive alongside one another and cultivate long alongside basic struggle and need, answering a question that the Western world often says turns to selfishness, greed, for survival. While Engle’s YOUR HEART MY SKY seems to suggest there are more opportunities for love in a time of hunger. The two teenagers become a symbol of vulnerable and imperfect desire to not let love leave with a lack of food, but rather let love bring food back.
The book is gentle, quiet, and responds to some of the deepest questions of humanity with an honest but hopeful hand.
This novel is for ages 12 and up. Written by critically acclaimed Cuban-American author, poet, memoirist Margarita Engle. Author of numerous novels including The Lightning Dream, a PEN Literary Award-Winner, The Surrender Tree a Newbery Honor book as well as receiving awards such as the Pura Belpré Author Award, Walter Honor, among many others. Engle served as the 2018-2019 Young People’s Poet Laureate.
Written by Ari Tison
Image ID: Book cover of Your Heart My Sky by Margarita Engle. Subtitle: Love in a Time of Hunger. The cover is of a girl and a boy with their eyes closed and heads together. The title sprawls over fruits and plants hanging from above their heads. Image of Margarita Engle smiling to the right.
