The Distance Between Us A Memoir

"A brutally honest book…akin to being the Angela's Ashesof the modern Mexican immigrant experience" ( Los Angeles Times). When Reyna Grande's father leaves his wife and three children behind in Mexico to make the dangerous trek across the border to the United States, he promises he will soon return from "El Otro Lado" (The Other Side) with enough money to build them a dream house. As months turn into years, his promises become harder to believe. Eventually he summons his wife to join him, and Reyna and her siblings remain in Mexico in the already overburdened household of their stern, unsmiling grandmother. When their mother returns, the reunion sets the stage for a dramatic new chapter in Reyna's young life: her own journey to "El Otro Lado" to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for yearsher long-absent father. In this heartbreaking, groundbreaking memoir, award-winning writer Reyna Grande brings to life her tumultuous early years, capturing all the confusion and contradictions of childhood torn between two parents and two countries. The Distance Between Usreminds us that the joys and sorrows of childhood are always with us, invisible to the eye but imprinted on the heart, forever calling out to us of those places we first called home.

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author, motivational speaker, and writing teacher. As a girl, she crossed the US–Mexico border to join her family in Los Angeles, a harrowing journey chronicled in The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist that has been adopted as the common read selection by over twenty schools and colleges and fourteen cities across the country. Her other books include the novels Across a Hundred Mountains, winner of a 2007 American Book Award, and Dancing with Butterflies, and The Distance Between Us, Young Reader’s Version. She lives in Woodland, CA with her husband and two children. Visit ReynaGrande.com.