Misfit Hero

One of the most heartbreaking scenes in Zoraida Córdova’s new middle-grades novel, The Way to Rio Luna, occurs early in the story when the protagonist, Danny Monteverde, watches his foster father toss his favorite book into the trash can. The book — titled, like the novel, The Way to Rio Luna — is an out-of-print children’s story, and represents Danny’s connection to his older sister Pili, who ran away shortly after the two were separated in the foster care system. Pili and Danny used to read the book together, using the various lands and adventures chronicled in the story to imagine a better life for themselves beyond being orphans caught in the sometimes hostile and often contradictory foster care system of New York City. Although Danny’s foster father’s action is undoubtedly cruel, the narrative presents his action as an attempt to socialize an eleven-year-old Danny and break him of his youthful attachments to magic.

Danny’s belief in magic is deep and is connected to a desire to reunite with his sister. Well versed not only in the details of his favorite book but also in a range of classic children’s literature, Danny looks for portals in wardrobes and rabbit holes to other worlds that might lead him to his sister. At one point, Danny buys a vile of glitter labeled “fairy dust,” and jumps off of a rooftop, believing this will make him able to fly. The allusions to canonical works like The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1865), and Peter Pan (1911) make the narrative one that would be satisfying to older readers while also inspiring younger ones to read further. Córdova even weaves in a sly reference to the Book of Cantos, which appears in her popular Brooklyn Brujas novels, which established her reputation as one of the rising stars of young adult writing.

Much of the first third of the narrative presents several well-meaning adults trying to convince Danny that magic is not real and that he should face the harsh truth that his sister may never be found. Among these is Mrs. Contreras, a social worker, who wants Danny “to be good and ordinary” and reminds him that “sometimes kids … want to believe in something so much that their minds played tricks on them.” Danny tries to follow Mrs. Contreras’s advice as he is moved from foster home to foster home, sometimes treated well and other times bullied by the children that he lives with. While living in a situation in which he is consistently bullied by two twin brothers, his fortunes begin to change.

Resigned to the fact that magic may not exist, he takes a school trip to the main branch of the New York Public Library. Although his foster brothers tease him for liking the library, Danny “didn’t feel so strange and out of place for loving books” when he was there. As with many protagonists in young adult literature, the library is a place where the protagonist can imagine new ways of relating to the world beyond those enforced by institutions like the school, the family, or the government. He becomes separated from his school group at the library, and encounters illuminated arrows that point him to a room that contains the original manuscript of Ella St. Clay’s The Way to Rio Luna. While admiring the manuscript, he meets Glory Papillon, a young woman about his age whose aunt is an archaeologist working at the library. The two of them explain that the book is an enchanted map that leads to Rio Luna, and that, because of his belief in magic, the book is revealing its secrets to him. One of these secrets is a check-out card at the end of the book that lists the previous children who made their way to Rio Luna, the last of which is his sister, Pili, who never...