Abuela, Don't Forget Me

by Rex Ogle

Overview

Rex Ogle’s companion to Free Lunch and Punching Bag weaves humor, heartbreak, and hope into life-affirming poems that honor his grandmother’s legacy.

In his award-winning memoir Free Lunch, Rex Ogle’s abuela features as a source of love and support. In this companion-in-verse, Rex captures and celebrates the powerful presence a woman he could always count on—to give him warm hugs and ear kisses, to teach him precious words in Spanish, to bring him to the library where he could take out as many books as he wanted, and to offer safety when darkness closed in. Throughout a coming of age marked by violence and dysfunction, Abuela’s red-brick house in Abilene, Texas, offered Rex the possibility of home, and Abuela herself the possibility for a better life.

Abuela, Don’t Forget Me is a lyrical portrait of the transformative and towering woman who believed in Rex even when he didn’t yet know how to believe in himself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324019961
Publisher:	Norton Young Readers
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	588 KB
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Rex Ogle is the author of Free Lunch, which won the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award; Abuela, Don’t Forget Me, a finalist for the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award; and Punching Bag, a NYPL Best Book of the Year. Rex lives in Los Angeles.
Rex Ogle was born and raised mostly in Texas. He received the 2020 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award for his memoir Free Lunch. His second book, Punching Bag, was a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Table of Contents

Foreword vii

1 Abuela's House 1

2 To and From 21

3 Gifts and Fists 87

4 An Education 113

5 Senior Year 135

6 There and Back Again 177

7 Now 197

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/15/2022

Ogle pays clear-eyed tribute to his maternal abuela while covering heavy topics such as child abuse, financial precarity, and racism in this searing verse memoir, a standalone companion to Free Lunch and Punching Bag. Chronological vignettes depict Ogle’s evolution from joyful toddlerhood (“My giggles cannot be stopped,/ they rush out like ants from a kicked mound”) to tumultuous adolescence (“junior year names/ Beaner./ Faggot”), astutely describing desperate hunger, whiplash from constantly moving house, and the pain from his mother’s physical abuse. Amid these difficult experiences, though, is Abuela’s steadying presence; her unwavering belief in Ogle (“Your future will be bright,” she says) and bone-deep appreciation for their shared Mexican heritage buoy him toward his future. Without weighing the narrative down, Ogle uses snappy verse rich in salient details and sprinkled with references to his previous works (“more than a punching bag of bruises,/ more than the butt of jokes at school where my lunch is free”) to candidly portray the realities of his upbringing alongside Abuela’s influence in shaping his identity. A bittersweet foreword references his abuela’s dementia, which serves as a driving force behind this poignant story. Ages 13–up. Agent: Brent Taylor, Triada US. (Sept.) ■

Publishers Weekly

"The humor, reflection, and heart present in these pages remind readers to cherish their bonds with their loved ones and that small moments can last a lifetime."

Booklist

★ 10/01/2022

Gr 9 Up—Ogle's free verse memoir is a series of vignettes, chronologically capturing the soft and dark moments of his childhood through post-college as the shared memories with his maternal grandmother (abuela) dim because of her dementia. Ogle's readers will recognize events from his earlier works Free Lunch and Punching Bag, but this is a solid standalone reflecting on parental abuse, poverty, bullying, bigotry, coming out, trauma, and the vital impact one person can have on a life. Ogle's use of repetition, symbolism, and extended metaphor cuts sharply. The book is broken into seven sections; in the sections "To And From" and "There And Back Again," a young and then post-college Ogle reaches out to his abuela with collect calls. As a child, it's to let her know where his mom has moved them, always living with others and in poverty. When he's older, it's after living on the streets and contemplating suicide. His father kicks him out because he's gay, and he doesn't know if even his abuela will be okay with him. She accepts the calls without question, though, and "collects" him each time with unconditional love. Even if readers don't see the extended metaphors—for instance, they won't know what a collect call is—there is raw honesty in this work that is compelling. The magnitude of intergenerational relationships, deep connections, and acceptance shine in Ogle's foreword and poems, which are clearly love letters to his abuela, captured like fireflies in a jar. VERDICT A must-purchase for all YA nonfiction collections, Ogle's work speaks directly to what so many young people experience and offers them hope.—Rachel Zuffa

School Library Journal

This heartfelt performance by Ramón de Ocampo is a tribute to grandparents who unconditionally love their grandchildren. The author's abuela was a never-ending source of support when his own parents weren't there for him. De Ocampo lovingly performs extremely emotional scenes that recount well-paced yet scattered memories of Ogle's life. De Ocampo expresses the strife and youthful ignorance Ogle stumbles through as his grandmother teaches him about his Latino heritage and his mother's absence. De Ocampo skillfully dives into the deep trauma Ogle experienced yet lifts the performance with the bright, wistful narration of Rex's abuela, a patient and kind woman. This moving audiobook is bittersweet and will evoke appreciation and nostalgia for those privileged with incredible grandparents. G.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile

2022-06-08
As palliative for his beloved Abuela'sworsening dementia, memoirist Ogle offers her a book of childhood recollections.

Cast in episodic rushes of free verse and paralleling events chronicled in Free Lunch (2019) and Punching Bag (2021), the poems take the author from age 4 until college in a mix of love notes to his devoted, hardworking, Mexican grandmother; gnawing memories of fights and racial and homophobic taunts at school as he gradually becomes aware of his sexuality; and bitter clashes with both his mother, described as a harsh, self-centered deadbeat with seemingly not one ounce of love to give or any other redeeming feature, and the distant White father who threw him out the instant he came out. Though overall the poems are less about the author’s grandmother than about his own angst and issues (with searing blasts of enmity reserved for his birthparents), a picture of a loving intergenerational relationship emerges, offering moments of shared times and supportive exchanges amid the raw tallies of beat downs at home, sudden moves to escape creditors, and screaming quarrels. “My memories of a wonderful woman are written in words and verses and fragments in this book,” he writes in a foreword, “unable to be unwritten. And if it is forgotten, it can always be read again.”

A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love. (Verse memoir. 13-18)

Kirkus Reviews