Joan Abelove

Go and Come Back

Joan Abelove

• 1998 LATimes–Young Adult finalist
• Score: 6.48

Here is a teenage voice you haven’t heard—from the Peruvian jungle.

Alicia lives much as her Isabo ancestors have lived for centuries in the Amazon jungle of Peru. She is astonished when “two old white ladies” arrive on the river and announce through their boatman, the girl’s mother’s brother’s wife’s brother, that they want to settle in Poincushmana for a time, to study. They are anthropologists (and actually in their twenties), but to Alicia and the others they are stingy, too skinny, sexually naive, and strangers. It is a baby girl (more valuable in the…