I really enjoyed this book! I loved the graphic novel approach the author took to write his memoir. This novel would be a great mentor text for students, as they could then create their own graphic novel/comic strip memoir and see that not all graphic novels have to be fictional! I think it would also be a great alternative for students who don‘t particularly like reading wordy books!

I love the way Pedro thinks about his grandfather, and how their relationship is developing. From someone he was wary about getting to know, and sharing a room with, to his own personal superhero. I also love how his grandfather interacted with him and joined in his drawings. So cute!

Loved it!

Short and sweet!

I really like how there is a mixture of Spanish and English in the story. It keeps it accurate to his experiences in his own memoir, rather than having everything in English. It‘s something I don‘t often see and I appreciate it.

I think as a whole, this collection of stories would be good to use as a mentor text for students. Students could choose a story to model their own short story after that teaches a life lesson. It would allow students to see different ways they could foreshadow a lesson, or characterize others in a brief way. It would allow for creative writing while also learning how to write narratives in a variety of different ways.

As a whole I really enjoyed this book. I loved all the individual characters and their stories that had nothing to do with one another, though I like to think they were all existing in the same world as one another, learning life together. It was a slice of life in every section, and would be a great piece to introduce to students to demonstrate different lived experiences, and promote critical thinking.

As I read through the book, I was adding tabs to different parts of each story where I felt the lesson that was being shared was being highlighted. However, the only story I found I did not tab as I was reading was. “Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents.“ It was not that there was nothing interesting about it, I was just so captivated by the prose-style writing that I got lost in it, and found it be more fun rather than a lesson.