The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist

Poetic dystopian? Well, not really but in this gorgeously written, wonderful little book the author describes a girl ahead of her time whose voice cannot be quieted despite many attempts by her mother and mother country. Engle's "Tula" rejects the status quo of slavery and women as property. She is ahead of her time and "fights" injustices through words, stories and actions. She pays a price for her voice because silence is unbearable. A beautiful book.

I have never been disappointed by one of Margarita Engle’s books and The Lightning Dreamer is no exception. It’s the fascinating true story of a Cuban woman who worked both for the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women. My guess is that many of you have never heard of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellanda, I certainly hadn’t. Engle’s ability to bring to life these lesser known but incredibly important historical characters is part of what makes her work so significant. Her novels in verse make historical characters like Tula accessible and real to younger readers.In writing this review, I was reminded of my obsession with biographies when I was in elementary school. When I was eight years old I decided that I was going to read every biography in my school’s library. Our biographies were shelved alphabetically by the name of the person the book was about. When I think about the books that I read then, I remember a number of books about Davy Crockett, Grover Cleveland and Amelia Earhart. Obviously, I didn’t make it all the way through, it would seem I stopped somewhere around E. But in thinking back, I’m struck by the lack of diversity in the people represented on my library’s shelves. I can only hope that with the availability of books like that of Engle things aren’t the same now. If books such as The Lightning Dreamer, The Surrender Tree, or Hurricane Dancers had been available to me then, I may have made it past E in my quest to read all those biographies.In telling the story of Tula, Engle’s book opens up a number of relevant topics for classroom discussion. As Tula becomes increasingly aware of the disparities in society, she begins to both ponder and write about things such as slavery, interracial marriage, and women’s rights. Tula grapples with these moral and ethical dilemmas in a language that invites students to question and struggle with her. She provides a way to teach our younger students about times when equal rights for people of color and women were explicitly denied. While it’s important to continue to discuss the ways in which equality is still not a reality for all people today, it’s just as important to discuss the historical contexts that our contemporary struggles for equality come from.Engle gives us a strong female protagonist who fights to remain authentic to the things she believes in, but in doing this, Engle also shows how hard it is to be that kind of person. It’s never easy to go against main stream society or to be the outcast among one’s friends or family. Through Tula, Engle gives voice to what it feels like to be alienated or exiled for one’s beliefs. These are powerful ideas for our students to think about—both those who can identify with Tula’s loneliness and those who realize they may be like the people who mocked Tula for being different. Tula is a powerful character, not just because of what she believed, but because of how she chose to stand up for those beliefs. She fought for equality and human rights through her stories and her poetry. She used the power of words as a means to change the minds of those around her. How valuable a lesson for the students in our classrooms—that our words are one of the most powerful tools we have for fighting against the things that try to hold us back. I’ll leave you with the words from Gertrudis Gómez de Avellanda that inspired the title of the book—“The slave let his mind fly free, and his thoughts soared higher than the clouds where lightning forms.”The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist has received a number of awards: 2014 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, School Library Journal's Top Ten Latino-themed Books for 2013, Teaching for Change 2013 Favorite, Center for the Study of Multicultural Children's Literature selection as a Best Multicultural Book of 2013, 2014 Pura Belpré Honor Book, and International Reading Association Top Chapter Book for 2013.Our free educator’s guide is available on our wordpress blog Vamos a Leer.

Engle writes the story of young abolitionist, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Tula, as she is called throughout the book, is in her early teenage years. Her mom believes it is time that she begins acting like a woman and get married: that she leave her silly stories of monsters and heroes behind and begin focusing on becoming a woman for the sake of her family. Tula has other plans. As her mother and step-father are locking up bookshelves to keep her from reading, Tula is borrowing her brother, Manuel’s, school texts. She fills her head with stories and shares her own writing with Manuel and the family’s cook, Caridad—a former slave whom her father freed and employed before his death. At the age of 14, Tula finds her way out of forced marriage. Tula finds herself a feminist abolitionist in a country where the censorship of such topics was severe, as mentioned in the historical background provided at the beginning of the book.This is a great book to introduce in middle school history classes. It provides an insight into slavery in other parts of the world, the Caribbean. This, I think as a student with Caribbean roots, is something I wish we spoke about in classrooms when I was younger. I have seen slavery be mistaken to be a solely “American” topic, when in fact, it took place in many forms and occupies different timelines globally. The feminist in Tula is something I believe should inspire all young readers as well.I, personally, enjoyed this book. Even now, as a 3rd-year college student, I found it to be a learning experience and a deeply inspiring tale. It was an easy read. I appreciated Engle’s decision to write this story in verse, and I suspect young readers will appreciate this easy-to-follow structure as well.