Spring 2019, Wild Readers 5 discussion

For my third book I read “Lowriders in Space” by Cathy Camper. I will be honest I only chose this book because the absurd title caught my eye. The book however...is just as weird as the title. The three main characters Lupe, Elirio, and El Chavor work together fixing cars in their garage (Cartinflas). Each of them love doing certain types of jobs that revolve around lowriders. The main conflict of this novel is that they want their own garage. The opportunity arises when they see that there’s a contest. They ultimately turn a junk car into the best car in the universe and go to space to see what it can do. Weird and random right? The illustrations in this book are very unique and you can see the Hispanic culture influence throughout the artwork. The style of artwork reminds me kind of the 50’s with colors seeming somewhat pale and blan. But still though cool artwork overall! The thing that I feel like I liked the most about this book is that the leader of the group Lupe is a female. This probably should not be that big of a deal, but I feel like I could use this as a mentor text later down the road during my teaching career simply because of Lupe and her female role. I can see this book being a hit with girls who like female leader roles. Or a student who likes cars. Overall this book was a great read and enjoyable from cover to cover. And a bonus to this book is that it teaches Spanish phrases. I don’t know hardly any Spanish at all, but this little addition to the book I found very cool and I am sure students would find very enjoyable as well!