Red Glass

by Laura Resau

Book Overview

With a dazzling and thoughtful voice, this critically acclaimed novel deals directly with the challenges and dangers of immigration, exploring the ties that bind us together in an age when issues threaten to divide us.

One night Sophie and her parents are called to a hospital where Pedro, a six-year-old Mexican boy, is recovering from dehydration. Crossing the border into Arizona with a group of Mexicans and a coyote, or guide,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0440240255
• ISBN13: 9780440240259
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 12 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 7 and higher

Customer Reviews

Great for all ages

Contains all the ingredients for a good story: tragedy, comedy, love, and danger. I'm using it in my book club for adult ESL learners who are from various world cultures. They love it! It treats modern issues of immigration, alienation, and human rights with sensitivity. Hispanic culture is beautifully interwoven as are the lives of common people who come to know and respect each other accross vast landscapes and invisible borders.

Courtesy of Teens Read Too

Laura Resau's RED GLASS was an amazing read. It's a wonderful mixture of excerpts from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, eccentric people, political unrest, and magical fortunes folded into a cross-continental summer road trip. Sophie is an amoeba, a free-floating spirit who is not attached to anything besides her family and her books. Then one night she picks up a phone call from the hospital. Seven Mexican migrants and their guide have died crossing the Arizona border. The lone survivor is a six-year-old boy named Pablo who had Sophie's stepfather's business card in his pocket. Pablo comes to live with Sophie, her parents, and Sophie's great aunt Dika, a Bosnian war refugee. Sophie grows to love her Principito, or Little Prince, but after a year her parents get in contact with Pablo's remaining family in Mexico. Over the summer, Sophie, Dika, Dika's boyfriend, and his son must take Pablo back to his hometown so that he can choose between his new family and his birth family. The trip is hard at first, because Sophie is afraid that anything and everything will go wrong. But the stories and the struggles of her companions change her perception of danger and she grows attached to Ángel despite her fears that she will lose him. When a terrible accident occurs, Sophie is forced to make a dangerous trip by herself. On the way, she realizes that while life has its risks, it is still beautiful and even fun. I loved this book. One of the things that was really well done was how it was multi-cultural without being culturally exclusive. Even though some of the dialogue was written in Spanish, it was still easy to read. But the best part of the book was its characters. They are both hilarious and tragic, but never melodramatic. At times, I felt as if author Laura Resau was in my head. Teens will identify with Sophie as one of their own. Reviewed by: Natalie Tsang

Red Glass is a guide book for how to be a hero

For any teenage girl who is too scared to be a hero and yet desperately wants to be one, Red Glass is for you. In many ways, Sophie's story is every girl's story - although the circumstances may be different - a story of beating her fear and finding out she is a person much stronger, wiser, and wilder than she ever imagined.

For girls who are going to travel the world/join the peace corps/speak 5 languages/kick butt

I love this book. Sophie is the kind of best friend every girl should have--she's generous, funny, artsy, more than a little neurotic, and really brave. She takes off with a crazy cast of characters on an adventure to die for, traveling from Arizona to Mexico and then into Guatemala to rescue her boyfriend-to-be. It made me want to learn 10 languages and travel around the world. I cried and laughed a lot, and had to look up places on Google Earth! Great read.

Barbara Kingsolver for the Slightly Younger Set

Like a Barbara Kingsolver for the slightly younger set, Laura Resau uses gorgeous, sensuous language to create a galloping good story with a timely social theme. Readers will never want this wonderful road trip with its cast of utterly convincing oddball characters to end. Red Glass is a book to fall in love with.