Maximilian & the Bingo Rematch by Xavier Garza (review)

In Max’s debut outing (Maximilian and the Mystery of the Guardian Angel), family secrets were revealed and family rifts healed, but there are still plenty of drama in the Texas middle-schooler’s life. First, there’s the contentious tías; you’d never guess the aunts love each other from the cutthroat way they battle over the Queen Bingo church trophy. Then there’s Max’s dream girl, Cecilia, who agrees to be his girlfriend and seals the deal with a kiss; her family moves to California two weeks later, leaving Max hopeless and heartbroken until Paloma, a beautiful new girl at school whose idea of flirtation is lying through her teeth to get Max in trouble, shows up. Paloma is also the niece of a luchadora who travels in the same circuit as Max’s beloved Tío Rodolfo, the feared tecnico Guardian Angel. And let’s not overlook the main event, the world championship tag team battle by Rodolfo/ Guardian Angel and Tío Lalo/El Toro Grande; new stars rise in the family, butthe pressure of competition calls for hard decisions. The juxtaposition of wryly narrated middle-school woes against the background of professional lucha libre wrestling continues to be a winner, and the bilingual text, heavy on conversation and idiom, can be engaged with, toyed with, or ignored, as the English or Spanish language reader prefers. This series should definitely be on the radar of bilingual classroom teachers, though, whose students can meet on common literary ground, while stretching across the gutter to appropriate the chatter of their classmates. This might also serve as an introduction for middle-schoolers to the goals and strategies of translators; kids need not be bilingual adepts to figure out that “por el amor de Dios” and “for crying out loud” are not exactly the same thing.