Nobody’s Son
The narrator of the novel is an absolute hoot. Funny and spunky and gifted with a talent for expression. Simply describing herself is an exercise in the efficiency of imagery to convey personality:
“My name is Haley Shondell McGrath. I am eleven years old. My father is in prison. My mother is dead. But don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t remember her. My uncle says I have her eyes. McGrath is an Irish name. It means ‘Son of Grace.’ But this McGrath right here is somebody’s daughter.”
The One Time
Haley’s uncle calls it the One Time. It is when you do the same thing over and over again countless times without anything ever bad ever happening. But there is always that one time when something unexpected enters the fray and things don’t just go bad, they become a disaster. Like the one time that Haley went down a covered slide in the park at the exact wrong moment:
“I had climbed to the top of the slide and slid my legs through. The tunnel sucked me into its darkness and I happy-screamed my way to the bottom. The park was nearly empty, but that day, as I sailed through the tunnel, another kid raced toward the slide on a scooter. He was a big kid and thick as a wall. My uncle saw it before I did—the kid coming toward the slide, me speeding through, then coming out into the light just as the kid sped past. We landed in a pile of banging heads, cracking bone and blood.”
Papi's Poems
Esteban is a student dealing with the terror of immigration crackdowns in the era of useless wall construction. A major element of the novel and a major source of imagery as well, are the poems that Esteban’s father—his Papi—writes to him from the misery of the detention center in which he is being held:
“And when darkness came and the night
felt like it wanted to swallow me
the echo of ‘Lights out!’ was thrown
back at the guards in so many beautiful languages
that it sounded like the song the world
has been trying to teach us
since the beginning of time.”
Cultural Differences
The most intense imagery associated with Esteban and his father, however, arrives in the fatherly words spoken to a son which reveals the true depth of depravity associated with blind allegiance to an anti-immigration ideology. The huge diversion in cultural differences separating those born in America who have no understanding of what it means as an idea to those willing to sacrifice all to come here and those who make the sacrifice is make visceral in the imagery of what it means to be rich that Esteban learns from his father:
“He said that where he came from, I wouldn’t be in school—I’d be working other people’s land or in a factory. ‘Imagine,’ Papi said, ‘a young boy like you with hands as hard as a man’s.’ He said since me and my sister were born in this country, we were born with the American Dream, like a silver spoon in our mouths. ‘You’re rich,’ he always told us. Not in money, ’cause money isn’t everything. But rich in dreams, ’cause in this country you can be anything.”
