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    Forest World
    Forest World
    Forest World
    Ebook197 pages1 hour

    Forest World

    By Margarita Engle

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From Young People’s Poet Laureate and award-winning author Margarita Engle comes a lively middle grade novel in verse that tells the story of a Cuban-American boy who visits his family’s village in Cuba for the first time—and meets a sister he didn’t know he had.

    Edver isn’t happy about being shipped off to Cuba to visit the father he barely knows. Why would he want to visit a place that no one in Miami ever mentions without a sigh? Yet now that travel laws have changed and it’s a lot easier for divided families to be reunited, his mom thinks it's time for some father-son bonding.

    Edver doesn’t know what this summer has in store, but he’s definitely expecting to meet a sister he didn’t know existed! Luza is a year older and excited to see her little brother, until she realizes how different their lives have been. Looking for anything they might have in common, they sneak onto the internet—and accidentally catch the interest of a dangerous wildlife poacher. Edver has fought plenty of villains in video games. Now, to save the Cuban jungle they love, he and Luza are going to have to find a way to conquer a real villain!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtheneum Books for Young Readers
    Release dateAug 29, 2017
    ISBN9781481490597
    Forest World
    Author

    Margarita Engle

    Margarita Engle is the Cuban American author of many books including the verse novels Rima’s Rebellion; Your Heart, My Sky; With a Star in My Hand; The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor winner; and The Lightning Dreamer. Her verse memoirs include Soaring Earth and Enchanted Air, which received the Pura Belpré Award, a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor, and was a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, among others. Her picture books include Drum Dream Girl, Dancing Hands, and The Flying Girl. Visit her at MargaritaEngle.com.

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      Book preview

      Forest World - Margarita Engle

      SUMMER 2015

      A time of change

      Family Disaster

      EDVER

      Miami, Florida, USA

      I thought I was prepared

      for any emergency. Fires, floods,

      hurricanes, rogue gunmen, bombs,

      and worse—we’ve covered them all,

      in scary student emergency training drills.

      We’ve shut down the school,

      painted our faces with fake blood,

      and practiced carrying one another

      to an imaginary helicopter, moaning

      and screaming with almost-real fear

      as we pretended to survive crazy

      catastrophes.

      Nowhere in all that madness

      did I ever imagine being sent away

      by Mom, to meet my long-lost dad

      in the remote forest where I was born

      on an island no one in Miami

      ever mentions without sighs,

      smiles, curses, or tears . . .

      but travel laws have suddenly changed,

      the Cold War is over, and now it’s a lot easier

      for divided half-island, half-mainland

      Cuban American families

      to be reunited.

      Mom is so weirdly thrilled,

      it seems suspicious.

      From the moment she announced

      that she was sending me away to meet Dad,

      I could tell how relieved she felt to be getting

      a relaxing break from her wild child,

      the troublemaker—me.

      If she would listen, I would argue

      that it’s not my fault a racing bicycle

      got in my way while I was playing a game

      on my phone and skateboarding at the same time.

      That’s what games are for—entertainment, right?

      Escape, so that all those minutes spent gliding

      home from school aren’t so shameful.

      As long as I stare into a private screen,

      no one who sees me

      knows

      I’m alone.

      Tap, zap, swipe,

      the phone makes me look as busy

      as someone with plenty of friends,

      a kid who’s good at sports

      instead of science.

      In that way, I’m just like Mom, who hardly ever

      looks up from her laptop on weekends.

      She just keeps working like a maniac,

      trying to rediscover lost species.

      She’s a cryptozoologist, a scientist who searches

      for hidden creatures, both the legendary ones

      like Bigfoot, and others that no one ever sees

      anymore, simply because they’re so rare

      and shy, hiding while terrorized by hunters,

      loggers, and poachers who sell their stuffed

      or pinned parts to collectors.

      Yuck.

      But what if there’s more?

      What if Mom’s real reason for peering

      into her secret online world

      is flirting to meet weird guys

      who might not even be

      the handsome heroes

      shown in their photos . . . ?

      What if she’s dating,

      and that’s why she needs

      to get rid of me, so she can go out

      with creeps

      while I’m away?

      Our Fluttering Lives

      LUZA

      La Selva, Cuba

      Green

      all around me,

      blue

      up above,

      and now my little brother

      is finally on his way

      to visit!

      I’ve heard about Edver all my life,

      from Abuelo, who misses his daughter—my mamá—

      and from Papi, who speaks so mournfully of a time

      when we all lived together as a family, rooted

      in our forest, and winged

      with shared dreams.

      Now, as I step down to a clay bank where clouds

      of blue butterflies have landed, brightness pulses

      as the radiant insects sip dark minerals from mud,

      performing a dance of hunger

      called puddling.

      Las mariposas—the butterflies—remind me

      of miniature angels, skyborne, glowing,

      magical and natural at the same time.

      Do they know how fragile and brief

      their airborne lives

      will be?

      After we travel to the city to meet my brother

      at the airport, maybe I’ll come back to this mossy

      riverbank and sculpt a vision of people

      with upside-down wings

      beneath leafy green trees

      rooted in sky. . . .

      Or even better, I could just stand here and wait

      for a tiny colibrí to arrive, a hummingbird no bigger

      than a bee, the world’s smallest bird, one of the many

      living treasures that make Papi such a great

      wildlife superhero, protecting our forest’s

      rare creatures

      from the hunger

      and greed

      of poachers.

      Saying Good-Bye to My Real Life

      EDVER

      On the last day of school before summer vacation,

      I move like a shadow, trying to hide from all the kids

      who saw that video of me crashing my skateboard

      into the racing bike.

      If I ever learn how to code my own truly cool game,

      I’ll fill it with shadow people whose feelings

      can’t be

      seen.

      Tomorrow I’ll fly to Cuba.

      Maybe getting away is a good thing.

      If I stayed home, all I would do

      is hide in my room

      and play games

      alone.

      Raro

      LUZA

      ¡Qué raro! How strange!

      Yes, it feels truly surrealistic

      to set out traveling like this,

      happily ready to meet a stranger

      and call him

      my brother.

      I hope he feels the same way about me.

      Rare.

      Like a forest bird

      in the city.

      The Isolation of Islands

      EDVER

      The plane lands.

      A flight attendant leads me to a line.

      Questions.

      Answers.

      Another fidgety wait.

      More questions.

      I show my passport.

      My backpack is inspected.

      The dissecting microscope

      is passed around by men and women

      in uniforms, some blue, others green,

      until eventually everything

      is returned to me

      instead of stolen.

      I sigh with relief,

      but by now I’m so nervous that all I want to do

      is calm my mind with the soothing clicks, zaps,

      and whooshes of electronic dragon flames

      in my favorite game, an online world

      filled with griffin slobber,

      troll breath, and the oozing farts

      of lumbering ogres.

      Imaginary animals are almost as bizarre

      as the real ones, like that iridescent green

      jewel cockroach wasp

      I wrote about

      for a nonfiction

      book report.

      The wasp injects poison into a roach’s brain,

      turning the bigger insect into a zombie

      that can be ridden like a horse,

      using the antennae as reins,

      until they reach the wasp’s nest,

      where guess what, the obedient roach

      is slowly, grossly

      eaten by squirming

      larvae.

      No beeps or ringtones now.

      No web of games and calming clicks.

      No Internet at

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