The sounds and the sights of El Barrio and the relationships and the emotions of Puerto-Rican-American family and neighborhood life form the backdrop for the each of the twelve stories that comprise An Island Like You. For the teenagers whose hearts and minds are unmasked in this powerful collection of short stories from Latina author Judith Ortiz Cofer, El Barrio is their home and their culture, steeped in the Puerto Rican traditions of their parents and grandparents, flavored with the promise and bitterness of urban American life. El Barrio is also the world they share. Yet each of the protagonists in An Island Like You moves through this world in his or her own way. The range of experience which Cofer brilliantly illuminates through the singular lives of her adolescent characters reveals truths that are sometimes comforting, sometimes startling, but always dancing on the edge of enlightenment. (Ages 12-16)

Judith Ortiz Cofer's Pura Belpre award-winning collection of short stories about life in the barrio!

Rita is exiled to Puerto Rico for a summer with her grandparents after her parents catch her with a boy. Luis sits atop a six-foot mountain of hubcaps in his father's junkyard, working off a sentence for breaking and entering. Sandra tries to reconcile her looks to the conventional Latino notion of beauty. And Arturo, different from his macho classmates, fantasizes about escaping his community. They are the teenagers of the barrio -- and this is their world.