This is in diary form. She tells her story to through her diary. Living in Haiti with her father gone. Being injured in a bombing. Than dealing with the move to join her father in the US. Well told from a young girls POV. ( )

Author’s note details her own life in Haiti and emigration to New York. There is also a list of suggested websites and discussion questions

I was so pleased to see that Danticat had written a middle grade novel! I live and teach in a community with a large Haitian population, so books set in that part of the world are especially valuable for my library. But I only got through half of this. It feels Important, but it's boring. Some of this is, I think, the fault of the diary format -- for instance, when the main character is caught in a bomb blast, that should have been a riveting action scene, but we have to hear about it at a remove a few days later when she gets around to writing about it in the hospital. Some of it might be that writing for middle schoolers is different from writing for adults, and even the most brilliant adult authors often don't get it. But when I have to force myself this hard, kids will too -- it isn't worth it.

Every one of Danticat's books is a delight. Her narrative voice is so distinctively hers yet conveys such a range of Haitian (and human) experience. Each time I read a new work of hers I feel like I get to know her more, like she has unveiled and shared another layer of herself. She writes about and has herself lived through such pain and sorrow in way that is beautiful, full of light and hope. I do not know of any other contemporary writer with such a gift for writing with grace in the face of sometimes unimaginable loss, of her own and of the people of Haiti. ( )

RGG: Okay story by an incredible author. Joins other literature about adolescents immigrating to the United States. Easier read.