[Review] Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

 

After reading The Poet X earlier this year, I knew I needed to add Clap When You Land to my read list. Told in the same immaculate and emotional free verse used in her debut, Acevedo brings together two voices from two different worlds who just happen to share DNA. 

Camino lives in the barrio in the Dominican Republic. She lives for the summers, when her father spends several months visiting from New York City. Yahaira, on the other hand, laments those long summers when her father leaves her to spend time back home in the DR. But all that changes when a plane goes down, taking both girls' father and the life they both knew with it. Now Camino and Yahaira must learn to carry on, with their own lives as well as the secret life their father lived in the other's country. Both girls might have lost their father, but they gained a sister and a new understanding on life. 

Told in alternating views, Clap When You Land is a wonderful story of inner turmoil, lost, pain, and how two girls thousands of miles apart can be connected by the most powerful ties of all.