This coming-of-age story is about a girl taken as a slave who ends up on a journey of self-discovery. She has a tumultuous upbringing in an indigenous peasant family in Ecuador. She is sent to live with a mestizo family (the Spanish upper class) for eight years as their nanny and maid. While the living conditions are an improvement over her family's small farm, she endures physical and verbal abuse and is denied an education. Narrating in a singular, authentic voice, Virginia dreams of escape, but her broken identity leaves her directionless. Along the way, though, she employs her imagination, persistence, and hard-won wisdom to recover her strength and freedom. The protagonist grapples with the enormous sociocultural gap between the indigenous people and the mestizos. The hallmark of this book is strong character development set in a complex and polarized social setting.

Editorial Reviews:

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In a desperately poor Andean village in Ecuador, 7-year-old Virginia is sold off by her indigena (Indian) parents as a servant to an academic, mestizo family. In her new home, the wife beats her, the husband gropes her, and she is insulted as a longa tonta (stupid Indian). Still, she teaches herself to read and write and begins to perform science experiments in secret. Then, when she is 12, she finally gets a chance to return to her parents: But does she want to? And do they want her? Virginia does travel back to her indigena family, but there is not the expected sweet reunion. Ashamed of her illiterate parents and bitter that they gave her away, Virginia is uncomfortable in the family's mud-walled shack, where she cannot speak the language and hates the hard work. Could she go back to being enslaved in the mestizo family's clean "prison"? Rooted in Farinango's true story, the honest, first-person, present-tense narrative is occasionally detailed and repetitive, but it dramatizes the classic search for home with rare complexity and no sentimentality or easy resolutions. Virginia's conflicts with her birth parents and her employers are heartbreaking, even as she finds a way to attend school and shape a more hopeful future. A moving, lyrical novel that will particularly resonate with teens caught between cultures. Grades 8-12. -- Hazel Rochman

Starred Review, Booklist, February 15, 2011:
"A moving, lyrical novel that will particularly resonate with teens caught between cultures."

Starred Review, Publishers Weekly, May 9, 2011:
"The authors' candid narrative richly depicts Virginia's passage from a childhood filled with demoralization to a young woman who sees her life through new eyes."