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. Grade 6-9–In spite of her family's openness, Milly Kaufman has never wanted to talk about her adoption. However, during ninth grade, Pablo Bolívar, 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 Bolívars 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Gr. 8-11. Alvarez returns to a familiar theme--the effect of a dictatorship on the citizens of a Latin American country--but half of this story is set in Vermont, where 16-year-old Milly Kaufman tries to come to terms with her adoption as a child from a never-named country. When new student Pablo arrives from their native land, Milly tries to ignore him, but she needs to know her history, so she returns for a visit with Pablo and his family. In some ways this is a blend of fairy tale and horror story. Pablo realizes Milly is from his country because of her unique eyes. Once in her homeland (the lack of the country's name is awkward and annoying), Milly returns to the region where people with her eyes live and finds the elderly woman who remembers all stories: Milly's parents were more than likely revolutionaries. The romantic personal voyage is mixed with the country's history of murders, rapes, and sadness. Alvarez was probably trying to make the personal universal here, but in many places this unwieldy and too long. Effective? Yes, sometimes--but not as much as it could have been. Ilene Cooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved 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. Julia Alvarez has written three other books for young readers, The Secret Footprints , a picture book; How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay , a middle-grade novel; and Before We Were Free , a young adult novel. She is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont.