This would be a great book for Intermediate Readers
This book is about a girl name Naomi who lives with her grandma and younger brother due to neglect from her mother. The story is about her growing in confidence as she faces many trials due to a custody battle and abuse from her mother.
This book would be a good book club or reading groups book. There are many important topics and perspectives that would be helpful to learn from this book, but it is also full of heavier topics that would be good to have some guidance and time to talk about

This is a chapter book about a young girl name Naomi and her incredible story of finding herself and standing up for her brother Owen, who was born with a physical disability. The two siblings live with their grandmother in California because their parents divorced when they were little, and the mother could not take care of them. One day out of the blue their mother shows up unexpectedly and it puts Naomi and Owen through a whirlwind. This is a great book for intermediate to advanced readers. ( )

Good story, of a strong child in a difficult situation, surrounded by people who love her. Naomi's growth in confidence and abilities is inspiring, and empowering. ( )

It was in a little town called Madera, about 30 minutes north of Fresno, California, that I first learned to love Oaxaca. The flowered clothing, the food, the bright colors, the dancing eyes and big smiles are hard to capture on paper. In some ways, Madera seemed like an extension of Oaxaca because, for the most part, the people living there are all from a tiny town called Santa Maria Tindu. A smaller subset of the people there speak Mizteca, a dialect, they say, that only exists in Oaxaca.

So when I heard the Pam Muñoz Ryan had a book set in that state I couldn't resist. But, as I ended the book, I realized that she also did a fine job capturing real issues in an accurate way. The anxiety, the lack of surety, the search for identity is not uncommon in similar situations. There's a poignantly real difference between this work that tells us how it is and other books that, perhaps, tell us more of what we would like to hear. ( )