America is an unusual girl, ready for the seed of hope. Not to write. To clean houses, get married, have children. America has an angry father, a troubled uncle who understands the importance of dreaming, and a Mama who writes alongside her at the kitchen table. The deep joy in Rodriguez's heartfelt book is that one feels such dreams can come true.
Trees plant themselves wherever they want, and rivers run down however they please.
The world really is as lush and unimaginably imaginative as Curtiss describes and Nathan paints it. What's unusual, really, is for a publisher to have had the courage to print a book that defies categories and possesses more than a little wildness of its own.