Red Glass
by Laura Resau

    RED GLASS by Laura Resau
    Category:  Contemporary
    Age Recommendation:  Grades 6+
    Release Date:  9/11/07
    Publisher:  Delacorte
    Reviewed by:  Natalie Tsang
    Rating:  5 Stars


    Laura Resau’s RED GLASS was an amazing read. It’s a wonderful mixture of excerpts from Antoine de Saint-
    Exupéry’s THE LITTLE PRINCE, eccentric people, political unrest, and magical fortunes folded into a cross-
    continental summer road trip.

    Sophie is an amoeba, a free-floating spirit who is not attached to anything besides her family and her books. Then
    one night she picks up a phone call from the hospital. Seven Mexican migrants and their guide have died crossing
    the Arizona border. The lone survivor is a six-year-old boy named Pablo who had Sophie’s stepfather’s business
    card in his pocket. Pablo comes to live with Sophie, her parents, and Sophie’s great aunt Dika, a Bosnian war
    refugee. Sophie grows to love her Principito, or Little Prince, but after a year her parents get in contact with
    Pablo’s remaining family in Mexico.

    Over the summer, Sophie, Dika, Dika’s boyfriend, and his son must take Pablo back to his hometown so that he
    can choose between his new family and his birth family. The trip is hard at first, because Sophie is afraid that
    anything and everything will go wrong. But the stories and the struggles of her companions change her perception
    of danger and she grows attached to Ángel despite her fears that she will lose him. When a terrible accident
    occurs, Sophie is forced to make a dangerous trip by herself. On the way, she realizes that while life has its risks,
    it is still beautiful and even fun.

    I loved this book. One of the things that was really well done was how it was multi-cultural without being culturally
    exclusive. Even though some of the dialogue was written in Spanish, it was still easy to read. But the best part of
    the book was its characters. They are both hilarious and tragic, but never melodramatic. At times, I felt as if author
    Laura Resau was in my head. Teens will identify with Sophie as one of their own.