Solito
By Javier Zamora
- Genre
- Biography, Memoir & Autobiography
- Publisher
- Hogarth (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780593498064
Solito is a memoir by the Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora, published by Hogarth in September 2022. It recounts the nine-year-old author's weeks-long journey, traveling alone, from El Salvador across Guatemala and Mexico to the United States. It won an ALA Alex Award and the Los Angeles...
When he was nine, the poet Javier Zamora traveled alone from El Salvador to the United States, a journey of weeks he had expected to take days. Solito narrates that passage in the present tense and the voice of the child he was, so that readers cross deserts and borders without the safety of hindsight. The strangers who become surrogate family, the fear, the boredom, the small kindnesses - all arrive at a boy's eye level, unfiltered by the adult who survived. intendle recommends it as one of the essential migration stories of our time, a book that turns a statistic into a specific, unforgettable child. Winner of an ALA Alex Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Read with Jenna selection, it is patient, sensory and profoundly humane. Few books make the word 'immigrant' feel so much like a person.