Winner of the American Book Award, Across a Hundred Mountains is a "timely and riveting" (People) novel about a young girl who leaves her small town in Mexico to find her father, who left his family to work in America-a story of migration, loss, and discovery.
After a tragedy separates her from her mother, Juana García leaves in search of her father, who left them two years earlier. Out of money and in need of someone to help her across the border, Juana meets Adelina Vasquez, a young woman who left her family in California to follow her lover to Mexico. Finding themselves in a Tijuana jail in desperate circumstances, they offer each other much needed material and spiritual support and ultimately become linked forever in the most unexpected of ways.
In Across a Hundred Mountains, Reyna Grande puts a human face on the controversial issue of immigration, helping readers to better understand "the desperation of illegal immigrants and the families they leave behind" (Entertainment Weekly) in pursuit of a better life. Reyna Grande is an award-winning author, motivational speaker, and writing teacher. As a young girl, she crossed the US–Mexico border to join her family in Los Angeles, a harrowing journey chronicled in The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her other books include the novels A Ballad of Love and Glory, Across a Hundred Mountains, and Dancing with Butterflies, the memoirs Migrant Heart, The Distance Between Us: Young Readers Edition, and A Dream Called Home, and the anthology Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings. She lives in Woodland, California, with her husband and two children. Visit ReynaGrande.com for more information. "A Mexican teenager leaves her destitute family and tiny village to cross the U.S. border in search of her father, who left two years earlier to find work and a new start. Sounding like a cross between a folktale and news ripped from today's headlines, bilingual narrators Cynthia Farrell and Marisa Blake find a good balance between the journalistic prose and the emotional subject matter involving loss of family and culture. The details, especially those of the girl being caught between her "coyote" handlers and U.S. Customs officials, are realistic, visceral, and heartrending. In the end, Farrell's and Blake's voices emphasize the glimmers of hope that make stories of immigration universal."
