School Library Journal
Gr 6-10-In her remote Guatemalan village, 14-year-old Gabriela is known as Tree Girl for her habit of fleeing to the forest and climbing high to escape the world. When guerrilla warfare comes to her area, her life is changed forever. Soldiers eventually discover the small school she attends, beat and murder her teacher, and shoot the other students. Tree climbing saves Gabi from that massacre, and she is away from home when her village is destroyed and nearly all of her family members are murdered. In the course of her flight north to a Mexican refugee camp, she again hides in a tree while soldiers rape and murder the inhabitants of another village. After arriving at the camp, Gabi cares for two elderly women and her one surviving sister and eventually founds a school. Her concern for others helps her recover from the trauma of her experiences. This is a graphic portrayal of the worst of civil war, based on one refugee's story. The author's anger that the U.S. government trained and supported soldiers who committed such atrocities is clear. Details of Guatemalan life are woven throughout the book, but it lacks the sensory descriptions that would allow readers to visualize the setting. Still, the action moves quickly, and Gabi's courage and determination are evident throughout. Readers not put off by the violence should find this an instructive and satisfying survival story.-Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Mikaelsen offers a chilling account of the Mayan genocide in Guatemala. Rumors of war and sporadic appearances of soldiers disturb the adults in Gabriela's small cant-n (village). Gabriela wants only to think about her upcoming quincea-era (15th-birthday ceremony) and climbing the trees she loves, but on the night of the party, soldiers steal her brother. The narrative voice falters at the beginning, distractingly full of hindsight, but improves by sounding immediate in the middle. War escalates quickly into rape, torture, and horrifyingly sadistic slaughter, with the peaceful Quiche (Maya Indians) totally at the mercy of Guatemalan soldiers. Gabriela's schoolmates and teacher are shot in front of her; her family and neighbors are murdered and the cant-n burned while she's at market. Escaping with one sister, Gabriela walks north to Mexico and eventually reaches a refugee camp. Lack of any author's note leaves this little-known, decades-long piece of cruel history (which the UN later ruled genocide) in a void. Still, a bitter and crucial story that needs to be told. (Fiction. YA)
JUNE 2009 - AudioFile
This true account comes from Gabriela, a survivor of the Guatemalan Civil War of the 1980s. Amber Sealey brings a matter-of-fact practicality to Gabriela, a 14-year-old girl who can climb higher than any boy in her Mayan village. Climbing trees saves her when the soldiers come to brutalize her village. She escapes and goes to a refugee camp, but the soldiers come again, and, again from high in the trees, she observes the beating, rape, and murder of innocents. Ben Mikaelsen's simple, direct language and Sealey's passionless voice produce a much-needed disconnect between the listener and the atrocities described. Sealey doesn't sensationalize, yet she manages to impart the horrors Gabriela witnesses, her resentment against the American government for supporting the soldiers, and her survivor's guilt. Grim, graphic, and powerful. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
