Last Monday the American Library Association announced the 2016 youth media award winners. Margarita Engle's 2015 Enchanted Air was named the winner of the Pura Belpré author award. According to the ALA's website, the Pura Belpré award is presented annually to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth. Enchanted Air was also a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults ages 12 to 18.The Plot: Engle's work follows other recent examples of memoirs in verse such as Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming and Thanhha Lai's Inside Out and Back Again in that it explores the author's childhood experiences of "otherness" during tumultuous periods in US history. Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings is composed of what Engle refers to in her author's note as "travel memories" from the first fourteen years of her life (191). The novel's dust jacket begins: "Margarita is a girl from two worlds." The young protagonist describes her life from 1951 through 1965 growing up in Los Angeles and frequently visiting her mother's homeland of Cuba. The first half of the narrative focuses on the magic Margarita experiences visiting Cuba and learning about the language and landscape of the island. As the years pass, revolution breaks out in Cuba and US-Cuban relations become strained by the events of the Cold War. As a middle-schooler, Margarita struggles to find her place and longs to return to Cuba. Eventually travel to Cuba becomes completely restricted, and Margarita's family travels to Europe instead.
The Poetry: Enchanted Air utilizes short, one to two page free verse poems and the poems are divided into four sections entitled "Magical Travels," "Winged Summer," "Strange Sky," and "Two Wings." These four sections are framed by a prose introduction "Love at First Sight" (which describes how Margarita's parents met and fell in love) and a Cold War timeline and author's note. Engle's poetic strength throughout her memoir in verse is her use of lush imagery and metaphor, particularly in her descriptions of the natural landscape. For instance, in her poem "The Dancing Plants of Cuba" she describes how "Fronds and petals wave / in wild wind" and
The delicate leaflets
of sensitive mimosa plants
coil and curl, folding up
like the pages
of a wizard's book,
each time I touch
their rooted magic (12).Moments like these accumulate throughout the early pages of her verse novel. Engle also utilizes subtle rhymes occasionally which contribute to the musicality of the narrative. As the narrative progresses, more and more time is spent focusing on the protagonist's longings and memories of her relatives and the Cuban countryside.
The Page: The poems in Engle's collection focus on the repeated themes of doubles and wings throughout. This is most evident in the various poems that are titled in both Spanish and English. Poems such as "Realidad/Reality" and "Hasta Pronto/Until Soon" are only found in the first two poetry sections that take place before 1961 when Margarita and her family are able to travel to Cuba. In the final section, in the poem "My Second Wing" the speaker of the poem meditates on her realization after visiting Spain that "other journeys / are magical too" and that she "can love / many countries, / not just two" (183).Engle's use of imagery and metaphor in Enchanted Air were lovely. I give her memoir in verse four stars.
