Finding Miracles

by Julia Alvarez Narrated by Daphne Rubin-Vega

Overview

MILLY KAUFMAN IS an ordinary American teenager living in Vermont-until she meets Pablo, a new student at her high school. His exotic accent, strange fashion sense, and intense interest in Milly force her to confront her identity as an adopted child from Pablo's native country. As their relationship grows, Milly decides to undertake a courageous journey to her homeland and along the way discovers the story of her birth is intertwined with the story of a country recovering from a brutal history.

Beautifully written by reknowned author Julia Alvarez, Finding Miracles examines the emotional complexity of familial relationships and the miracles of everyday life.

Editorial Reviews

Milly Kaufman thinks she's an ordinary Vermont teenager, but that changes when the new student arrives. Like Milly, Pablo is an immigrant from a country recovering from decades of brutal dictatorship and political corruption. As her friendship with Pablo grows, Milly realizes that she had never confronted her own origins. Courageously, she decides to journey back to a homeland she scarcely knows. An arresting novel from an award-winning novelist.

Publishers Weekly

Milly Milagros Kaufman has two names and two identities. She is "Milly," a fairly normal ninth grader, who has lived in Vermont for most of her life with her adoptive parents, sister and younger brother. She is also "Milagros," the abandoned orphan who was rescued from a troubled (unnamed) Latin American country by two Peace Corps volunteers when she was a baby. Self-conscious about being adopted, Milly avoids discussing or even thinking about her past, until she meets Pablo, a refugee who comes from the same politically unstable country where Milly was born. As Milly listens to Pablo's stories of home, her curiosity is piqued along with a long-repressed desire to connect with her birthplace, and when the opportunity comes for her to visit it (with Pablo and his family), Milly jumps at the chance. In this tender tale, Alvarez (Before We Were Free) traces Milly's discovery of herself and a country that is at once beautiful and terrible. Despite the fact that Milly does not find answers to all of her questions, she does find acceptance and new purpose during her journey. The circumstances of Milly's trip and her relationship with Pablo feel somewhat contrived, yet her internal growth and changing attitudes progress authentically. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Gr 6-9-In spite of her family's openness, Milly Kaufman has never wanted to talk about her adoption. However, during ninth grade, Pablo Bol'var, a refugee from an unnamed Central American country, joins her class and immediately identifies her as someone who might have come from his family's hometown. Then, her grandmother attempts to make a will that differentiates between her and her siblings. While her mother and father's angry reaction makes the woman back down, their increasingly close relationship with Pablo's family makes it impossible for Milly to stop thinking about the parents who gave her up and the war-torn nation she came from. When that country's dictator is deposed in a democratic election, the Bol'vars go home to visit and invite Milly along. There she discovers a world quite different from her Vermont home, an extended family, a boyfriend in Pablo, and several possible sets of birth parents. She realizes, too, how much she loves her own family, and they join her for a grand reunion. The strength of this book lies in its description of adoption issues-Milly's feelings of abandonment and difference and her sister's fear that Milly's increased identification as Latina will destroy their close relationship. However, the plot is contrived to help Milly find her identity, and the characters never really come alive. The home country has been stripped of any identifying characteristics that might make the setting interesting. Still, readers interested in this subject will be pleased with the satisfying resolution.-Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Ninth-grader Milly struggles to deny her adopted status in a loving family until she begins to understand her origins through a friendship with Pablo, a new arrival from her country of birth. Vague as to which Central American country this is, Alvarez universalizes the story of a young girl finding both the love and the confidence to search for her birth parents. Through her attachment to a new student at her school-whose instinctive recognition of her connection to him gradually blossoms into romance-Mildred Milagros grows into her bicultural skin. Grounded in the daily life of school friends at first, the author explores Milly's adoptive family and then, as she seeks her roots, moves all the action to where Milly was born. Rather than losing anything, Milly finds herself gaining as she explores her heritage-resulting in a rich portrayal of this brave and lucky young woman. Written with immediacy and charm, there is accessibility to the very American Milly's attitudes and ideas that will help readers accompany her on her journey of discovery and growth. (Fiction. YA)

APR/MAY 05 - AudioFile

Adopted from a war-torn country, Millie struggles on many levels with her teenaged search for self. Her life in Vermont suddenly seems foreign when a new boy arrives from her native country. As the story unfolds, significant changes in her life culminate with a trip to her birth country. The meanings of friendship, family, romance, heritage, and the cruelty of war are all brought together as Millie finds her true home. Daphne Rubin-Vega’s reading highlights the inflections and accents of a bilingual teenager and presents Millie’s story in a straightforward style. However, Julia Alvarez’s excellent writing is not fully successful in transcending to the spoken word. L.D.H. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171815646
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/12/2004
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

I took the class where we wrote stories with Ms. Morris. It was a three-week elective we could do on the side with regular English class. I did it because, to be truthful, I needed the extra credit. I’ve always had big problems with writing, which I’m not going to go into here. I knew my English grade, a C, was rapidly gyrating into a D. So I signed up.

 

“Stories are how we put the pieces of our lives together,” Ms. Morris told us that first class. The way she talked, it was like stories could save your life. She was like a fanatic of literature, Ms. Morris. A lot of kids didn’t like her for that. But secretly, I admired her. She had something worth giving her life to. Except for saving my mom and dad and sister, Kate, and brother, Nate, and best friend, Em, and a few other people from a burning building, I didn’t have anything I could get that worked up about.

 

“Unless we put the pieces together we can get lost.” Ms. Morris sighed like she’d been there, done that. Ms. Morris wasn’t exactly old, maybe about Mom and Dad’s age. But with her wild, frizzy hair and her scarves and eye makeup, she seemed younger. She lived an hour away near the state university and drove a red pickup. Occasionally, she referred to her partner, and sometimes to her kid, and once to an ex-husband. It was hard to put all the pieces of her life together.

 

Ms. Morris had this exercise where we had to jot down a couple of details about ourselves. Then we had to write a story based on them.

 

“Nothing big,” she said to encourage us. “But they do have to be details that reveal something about your real self.”

 

“Huh?” a bunch of the guys in the back row grunted.

 

“Here’s what I mean,” Ms. Morris said, reading from her list. She always tried out the exercises she gave us. “The morning I was born, I had to be turned around three times. Headed in the wrong direction, I guess.” She looked up and grinned, sort of proud of herself. “Okay, here’s another one. When I was twelve, an X‑ray discovered that I had extra ‘wing bones’ on my shoulders.” Ms. Morris spread her arms as if she was ready to fly away.

 

The huh guys all shot a glance at each other like here we are in the Twilight Zone.

 

“So, class, a detail or two to convey the real you! Actually, this is a great exercise in self-knowledge!”

 

We all groaned. It was kind of mandatory when a teacher was this kindergarten-perky about an assignment.

 

I sat at my desk wondering what to write. My hands were itching already with this rash I always get. Since nothing else was coming, I decided to jot that down. But what came out was, “I have this allergy where my hands get red and itchy when my real self’s trying to tell me something.” For my second detail, I found myself writing, “My parents have a box in their bedroom we’ve only opened once. I think of it as The Box.”

 

Ms. Morris was coming down the rows, checking on our progress. “That’s great!” she whispered when she read over my paper. Now my face, along with my hands, turned red. “You could tell an interesting story with just those two facts!”

 

“I made them up,” I said a little too quickly. Oh yeah? All she had to do was look at my hands.

 

“Then write a story about a character for whom those two facts are true,” Ms. Morris shot back. You couldn’t get around her enthusiasm, no way.

 

I felt relieved when music sounded over the loudspeaker for the end of the period. That’s a telling detail about our school. Instead of bells, we get music, anything from classical to “Rock-a-bye, Baby” to rock. I guess we’re free spirits in Vermont. Bells are too uptight for us.

 

I ended up writing some lame, futuristic story about this girl alien whose memory chips are kept in a box that she can’t open because her hands need rebooting. Some idea from a late-night movie Em and I had seen on TV at her house, where her parents have a dish and get all the weird channels.

 

I could tell Ms. Morris was disappointed that I didn’t write about my own life. And though my hands kept breaking out in rashes, trying to tell me Milly! It’s time!, I wasn’t ready yet to open my box of secrets.

 

But sometimes, like with my allergies, it takes an outside irritant to make you react. My outside “irritant” showed up the next day in Mr. Barstow’s class.

 

 

 

He stood in front of us, head bowed, so you couldn’t really see his face. His skin was golden brown like mine gets in the summer after a few weeks in the sun.

 

Mr. Barstow, our homeroom/history teacher, was introducing him: Pablo something something something—he must have had about four names. “Let’s give our classmate a warm welcome!”

 

Warm welcome was right. It was one of those freezer-compartment January days when even people who love winter have to ask themselves, Am I out of my mind? I wasn’t one of those people, winter lovers I mean. But from time to time, I had my own reasons to ask myself, Milly, are you out of your mind? Loving winter was not one of them.

 

“Hey, class, come on. You can do better than that!” When he wasn’t teaching World History or being our homeroom teacher, Mr. Barstow was the football-basketball-baseball coach. He could work up a crowd. He had less luck with ninth-grade homeroom in the middle of winter.

 

We managed a lukewarm applause.

 

Pablo wasn’t dressed for cold weather at all. He had on a short-sleeve khaki-colored shirt and a pair of new jeans that looked like they’d been ironed. Nobody at Ralston High wore jeans that were one, new; two, without a rip or tear; three, ironed. He looked so awkward up there. My heart just automatically went out to him.

 

Mr. Barstow was going on about Pablo, how he had two older brothers, how his parents were refugees. . . . I shifted into classroom cruise control . . . coasting along . . . not paying attention. . . . But then Mr. Barstow said something that made my hands begin to itch and my face darken with self-consciousness.

 

Em, my best friend, sits one row over and three seats in front of me. I could see her shoulders tense up. She was going to turn around any moment. Please, Em, I thought, please don’t! I just couldn’t stand her drawing any attention to me.

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