Tree Girl: A Young Adult Novel About a Guatemalan Refugee Searching for Her Sister and Hope

Will break ur heart and crush ur soul, still an amazing read

I would never have chosen to read this book had it not been for the BYL parents bookclub. But, I read this book over the past 24 hrs. Partially because it was so good and it pulled me in so deeply and partially because I needed to get through it and have it be over. This book is absolutely heartbreaking. It reminded me that people and governments can be truly terrible. It shored up even stronger in me the belief that all people are deserving of safety, shelter, food, love, education, freedom and community. I am made both better and worse by this book. I feel broken and helpless, but also more aware, my eyes widened to something that I knew little about. This took place while I was a child playing happily on a farm in MN. A childhood like that is what the real Tree Girl and her siblings and all of the children of Guatemala should have had. What does a person do with these feelings, with this knowledge? Especially when this is just one of many, many terrible things that has taken place. That are still taking place. Knowledge may be power, but it is also pain.

This is a really good book, that I would not let my child read. We handle dark topics and genocide is one of them, but I would say late teens at the earliest because of the numerous explicit depictions of intense violence.