Detained

D. Esperanza's story is a perfect example of how the personal is political. Thirteen-year-old Esperanza could not have anticipated that his first journal would become this memoir, just as he could not have foreseen the circumstances—the deaths of his caregivers—that forced him and his young cousins from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States. Unfortunately, the hundreds of perilous miles the four boys traversed over the course of four months was not the worst of it; Esperanza and his cousins were detained and separated at the border; he was then held in detention for the next five months while waiting to be reunited with his parents in Tennessee. Written with tremendous tenacity and foresight, Detained reveals the inhumanity and senselessness of U.S. immigration policies. Much like Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, this should be required reading.