Parrot in the Oven: Mi vida
by Victor Martinez
from Rayo
It's no wonder that Parrot in the Oven won the 1996 National Book Award for Young People's Fiction. Victor Martinez's lush, evocative prose leaps from the page, grabbing the reader by the throat right from the start. Not only do we witness Manuel Hernandez's coming of age, we feel every juicy moment of it: his ache for something just out of reach, the confusion of seeing his family with new eyes, the tickle and flood of awakening passion. It's difficult to portray transformation from the inside, but Martinez does so with grace and power.
Dad believed people were like money. You could be a thousand-dollar person or a hundred-dollar person -- even a ten-, five-, or one-dollar person. Below that, everybody was just nickels and dimes. To my dad, we were pennies.
Fourteen-year-old Manny Hernandez wants to be more than just a penny. He wants to be a vato firme, the kind of guy people respect. But that's not easy when your father is abusive, your brother can't hold a job, and your mother scrubs the house as if she can wash her troubles away.
In Manny's neighborhood, the way to get respect is to be in a gang. But Manny's not sure that joining a gang is the solution. Because, after all, it's his life -- and he wants to be the one to decide what happens to it.
Parrot in the Oven
"Fourteen-year-old Manny Hernandez lives in a housing project in southern California. He and his other Mexican-American neighbors sleep in houses made of sheetrock and tin. They sit in yards worn down to dust, and hope that somehow luck will come their way. Poverty isn't the only problem in Manny's life. His father thinks Manny is as worthless as a penny. His crazy mother thinks she can scrub away or slap away his worries. Each day Manny hopes that Bobby and Stinky, the sadistic brothers across the parking lot. won't beat him up. Manny could join a neighborhood gang, but he's determined to make his own life worth something more."
El loro en el horno, mi vida
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