Shelf Life

A California Young Reader Medal nominee for 2006-2007 (Jr. High/Middle School category)

Naomi Soledad León Outlaw is a quiet, unassuming, mixed race-girl with a strange name. She lives with her great grandmother and her brother Owen in an Airstream trailer at Avocado Acres Trailer Park in Lemon Tree, California. Naomi and Owen have lived there for seven years, since their mother abandoned them. Owen is extremely intelligent but is physically deformed from birth defects. He also exhibits some obsessive compulsive tendencies but is otherwise a happy and well adjusted child.

Naomi is a list maker, in fact making list is at the top of her list of things she is good at. She is also good at carving, a skill she inherited from her nearly forgotten father, Santiago León of Oaxaca, México. Naomi leads a poor but comfortable life with her brother and Gram and a small, but close-knit community at the trailer park. She is painfully shy, to the point that she feels unable to defend her brother from the mocking of schoolyard bullies.

Naomi’s world is shaken to its foundation when her mother shows up unexpectedly. She has rechristened herself Skyla and has a new man in her life, the controlling Clive. Skyla claims to have turned her life around through counseling and quitting alcohol but Naomi suspects that this is a front. Skyla reveals that she intends to take Naomi with her to live in Las Vegas with Clive and his daughter. Gram and Naomi realize that Skyla and Clive only want Naomi to baby sit and to get welfare and they refuse to cooperate. Skyla threatens violence and legal action so Gram and her neighbors hookup Baby Beluga (the Airstream trailer) to a truck and head to Mexico to find Naomi’s father in hopes of enlisting him in a custody battle.

In Mexico Naomi feels like she has discovered a part of herself that has lain dormant since early childhood. She and Owen feel just as at home in Oaxaca as they do in Avocado Acres. But tension mounts as they race against time to find their father, with the specter of Skyla looming over them. Ultimately Naomi must find the lion within her—El León—to seize control of her own destiny.

Ryan does an excellent job depicting mood and setting, letting us see Oaxaca at Christmas through the eyes of a child. She vividly brings to life Las Posadas, el mercado, and the little known festival “La Noche de Los Rábanos” or Night of the Radishes. Naomi is every bit as inspiring as Esperanza and, like Esperanza Rising, the ending of this book is very uplifting.