The Circuit

 By: Francisco Jimenez (1997)

This book is about a Mexican family that comes to the United States and finds work in the fields, picking cotton, strawberries, and other produce. Due to the nature of their line of work, this family is constantly on the move, following the crops that need to be harvested at different times of year. Because of this, the family cannot establish a permanent residency, causing the family to live out of tents and other temporary shacks and the children to constantly change schools, when their schedules allow the children to go to school. While their lives are certainly hard, they are able to overcome the difficulties that they face by sticking together, looking after each other, and loving each other through it all.

I thought that this book was really interesting because it presented a first-hand account of what it is like to be a migrant worker. The struggles that this family faced every day were amazing and yet they  continued to work hard and not feel sorry for themselves despite the hard life that they were living. I think that the author did a really good job telling the stories through a child's point of view, using a child's language and way of thinking.

I think that this would be a very powerful book for students to read, regardless of their age, because of the strength that this family shows in the face of adversity. Many people probably do not give much thought to the difficult lives that many immigrants had years ago, and are still having today as they try to make it in a new country. The stories told in this book would certainly put a lot of "problems" that children are having in perspective as they hear what it is like to work hard every day, without knowing where you will end in the morning.