Then they realize the ghost light-the light that is always kept on at every theater in order to appease the ghosts-wasn’t lit! When the kids rush to flick the switch back on, they find themselves locked in the theater-but that’s the least of their problems when the ghost of the Ethel makes her debut appearance!Ĭan the cast overcome their fears and reverse the ghost’s curse before opening night so they can save the show-and their dreams?īy Abby Jimenez (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing) Will this show finally break the curse of the Ethel? The kids aren’t quite sure if the curse is even real, but when their first performance doesn’t quite go as planned, it certainly feels that way. The kids in the cast each have their own reasons for wanting to make the show a success, and all eyes in the theater world are on them. Enter twelve-year-old Monica Garcia, who has been cast to star in a Broadway musical revival of The Goonies, the theater’s last chance to produce a hit before it shutters its doors for good. Show after show has flopped and the theater is about to close. No one is sure how or why, but the evidence speaks for itself. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents’ home country. She gave herself permission to return-to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family’s history, and begin to make her own way.Īlternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, “What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?” While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn’t been back since she was a child.
By Jennifer De Leon (University of Massachusetts Press)
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