Across the Face of the Storm

by Jerome R. Adams

Overview

This is an apprenticeship novel, the story of Isabel Cooper, 17, and her 15-year-old brother, Frederick. In early 1911, they leave their Georgetown home after the sudden death of their Mexican mother. They are determined to find their father, a college professor who – like many American leftists – had joined the Mexican revolution a few months earlier. They travel by train, stagecoach, and wagon, at first put off by what they see of turn-of-the-century American South. But they soon learn of the quiet dignity of their mother’s homeland. After an ugly incident not of their making, they escape the federales with the help of Pepe, a lad of many talents. He leads them to refuge with a ragtag militia on its way to join Carranza’s Army of the North, commanded by a woman known as La Maestra

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771836814
Publisher:	Guernica Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/01/2021
Series:	World Young Readers , #41
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

About the Author

After service in the Peace Corps in Colombia, Jerome Adams went to work for The Charlotte (NC) Observer, a daily newspaper. He went on to a career as a freelance writer and teacher. He hopes it was his wanderlust that has moved his four children to live and work in Nigeria, Albania, Italy, and Costa Rica.

Editorial Reviews

2021-08-18
Journalist Adams turns his pen from adult nonfiction about Latin America to YA fiction grounded in the military history of the Mexican Revolution.

After 15-year-old Frederick and 17-year-old Isabel’s mother passes away in Washington, D.C., in 1911, the siblings set off for her homeland of Mexico in search of their only remaining parent. Their White American father, a professor, has gone there to support the revolutionary forces of Pancho Villa, who is trying to bring an end to the regime of President Porfirio Díaz. On the way, they join up with a traveling band of citizen soldiers, a ragtag team who hope to lend support to the revolutionary cause. A series of minor skirmishes escalates on the way to the climactic battle along the banks of the Río Bravo. Once the violence starts, character development takes a back seat to play-by-play descriptions of battles and weaponry. Though the main purpose for the teens’ presence in Mexico is to reunite with their father, this event comes and goes anticlimactically, with the story returning instead to minutiae of military movements. While there is certainly an audience for plot-driven military dramas and for engaging fictionalized accounts of Latin American history, this title cannot seem to decide whether to be a character-driven novel or detailed military history. Secondary characters likewise suffer from minimal backstory and character development.

A novel that vacillates between military history and family drama. (Historical fiction. 13-18)

Kirkus Reviews