A
Aida Salazar
Land of the Cranes
Synopsis
Betita is nine years old when her family flees cartel violence in Mexico and settles in Los Angeles, seeking political asylum in the place her father calls Aztlán — the ancestral land of the cranes. She's just starting to feel at home when Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps up her family: her father is deported back to Mexico, and Betita and her mother are confined to a family detention center.
Told in verse, Aida Salazar's middle-grade novel follows Betita as she holds on to her sense of self through the picture poems her father taught her, even as the system threatens to pull her family further apart.
Land of the Cranes won the Américas Award and the Pura Belpré-adjacent honors circuit for Latino children's literature, and is drawn in part from real accounts of family immigration detention in the United States.
Vibe
Genres
Characters
BetitaProtagonist
Nine-year-old girl held with her mother in a family immigration detention center after her father is deported.
PapiSupporting
Frequently asked questions
Is Land of the Cranes appropriate for younger middle-grade readers?
It's written for the upper end of the middle-grade range (roughly ages 10-12) rather than early middle grade. The book deals directly with immigration detention, family separation, and cartel violence, so it's worth previewing for more sensitive readers.