Ysrael

I found this story very shocking. How can children be left alone as those two children have been, with their father only “sending them presents at Christmas” and their mother working most of the time at a chocolate factory “without having the time or energy” to take care of them? These two children have a lot of liberty and they seem that they haven’t been taught any moral values. They fight a lot, steal money and criticize others for their appearance. It is very shocking to think that this story may be based on reality, that there are girls out there who think that “they won’t get pregnant if they drank a Coca Cola afterwards”. I found there was kind of a dark humor in the story, because this sentence made me laugh, but still made me feel bad because it may be actually true. This makes me think about the inequalities between different countries, how unfair it is that there are innocent children who have to struggle because of poverty and lack of education when they don’t deserve it. I think the author’s objective was to show how difficult can be the life of a child who has to face this situation.

I liked the fact that the story was written from the nine year old child’s point of view. I think this stresses even more on the gravity of the social problems described in the story. By writing the story from an innocent child’s point of view, we can see how he is influenced by what surrounds him, and how he ends up following his brother’s bad attitude. It shows us how he is innocently led to be violent, without even knowing that he’s following a wrong path in his life. But does he have a choice?

I also found interesting the style on which the story was written. I liked that the author didn’t translate some words into English, and left them in Spanish. This makes the story more familiar and realistic, from the point of view of a child using words as “Mami” or the nickname “Rafa” to refer to his brother. I liked that this story seemed to be real; I would have thought that the author was writing about his own childhood if I didn’t know that it is a fictive story. However, even if it’s just fiction, the story deals with real social problems and therefore makes us think about reality.

Do you think that the little boy is going to end up being as his brother is?