The Win Over

January 15, 2023
Growing pains afflict a prospective blended family when matriarch T�a Enriqueta announces that she won't be attending the wedding. Twins Raquel and Lucinda Mendoza and their soon-to-be stepsister, Juliette Viramontes, got past some rough patches in The Do-Over (2022), but several remain to be navigated in this sequel--particularly after Marcos and Sylvia, their respective parents, decide to move the wedding to the Viramontes family's ancestral ranch in Mexico and Sylvia's T�a Enriqueta digs in her heels, claiming that it's all happening too quickly. How to, as the title frames it, win her over? Though mostly focusing on the family issue, Torres tucks new cousins and other relatives, cute goats to milk, a hidden treehouse, an old diary, and even a couple of secret passages into a fluid narrative inflected by the language, foods, and values of its Latine cast. The younger set gets together for delicious adventures in the kitchen as they concoct obleas, caramel sweets inspired by a secret family recipe. Meanwhile, Raquel and Enriqueta bond in mutual recognition that both are batalladora--tough. This bonding ultimately leads to a properly festive ceremony...and life-altering decisions for the three seventh graders as well. Torres again tells a warmhearted tale in which personalities clash and mesh on the way to a loving resolution. Domestic kerfuffles weathered by plenty of love and sweet cajeta. (Fiction. 8-12)

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