Pardalita

Gr 8 Up–So much is revealed in just the first minute: Raquel (her name being the one detail withheld a bit longer) lives in a small town where “everyone is up in each other’s business.” She’s waiting for her mother after being suspended for calling a nosy school monitor a “piece of shit.” Her parents are divorced because her father is getting remarried. She remarks that Pardalita “flew past”; the intensity of that impression caused her to write Pardalita’s name “without noticing” onto the table where she waits. That dense sparseness defines Portuguese author/artist Estrela’s absorbing on-the-page hybrid of prose, free verse, black-and-white drawings without and within graphic panels. Debut narrator Vázquez (who’s also an editor for Pardalita’s U.S. publisher, Levine Querido) is Estrela’s unhurried cipher, adroitly inserting pauses to allow listeners to absorb the multilayered details of Estrela’s reveals. Vázquez is seemingly proficient/fluent in Spanish—she pronounces jacaranda with an opening “h” sound—but isn’t necessarily a Portuguese speaker (jacaranda has a j-as-in-Jack first syllable). Textless printed pages are many, necessitating additional descriptions and prompts that still dovetail seamlessly into an affecting performance.