Book Review- Some Rivers End on The Day of the Dead

By Eileen Clemens Granfors

Publisher: Self

Source: Author

Synopsis (from Createspace): Fourteen-year old Marisol and her mother are on the run. Her father has been murdered.

But Marisol’s new home is a riverbed camp. When a wildfire separates Marisol from her mother and her school, she challenges herself to to celebrate the Day of the Dead in Mexico for her father's memory.

Some Rivers End is a sweet quick read about Marisol’s struggles to get used to the United States life and way of life. After living in Mexico for most of her life Marisol and her mother return to The United States fleeing from what they believe to be drug gangs that killed her father, a journalist that was not afraid to expose the truth behind the drug wars in Mexico.

Poor Marisol’s life gets turned upside down, her mother changes their last name they don’t have a home to live in so they are forced to camp under a tree next to a dried up old river. It seems frightening and shocking just thinking about the situation that Marisol and her mother have to go through. The big change of moving to a new country where they have to learn the American way. Marisol finds it hard fitting in at her new high school, and even though she is fluent in English she can’t quite understand or make sense of the slang language and takes some things a little too personal or offensive.

I really felt sad for Marisol and what she has to go through in this novel, the long journey and struggles to reunite with her mother. I liked that Marisol was good hearted and traditional in her Mexican culture but also very determined to succeed and finding a solution to her problems. There were a few things about the novel that really bothered me and distracted me from getting into the story and liking it more. There were some typos and grammar errors, a few of the sentences in Spanish weren’t written correctly and didn’t make a lot of sense. This might not bother everybody, unless you can read and write Spanish but it definitely distracted me enough that I had to go back over and read some of the parts all over again, I just found it a bit frustrating. The thing is that Marisol is suppose to be fluent in English and also in Spanish, she pretty much lived her whole life in Mexico so reading the things that she says in Spanish and finding big flaws made the story a bit less realistic to me. Some Rivers End of The Day of the Dead was a light-hearted read with a lot of cultural aspects and traditions, and a character full of innocence going through a journey that ends up opening her eyes about the real world and life.