My Blue Butterfly

Locations
Call Number: Youth-World-SPA Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Kids WORLD 4-week checkout	Youth-World-SPA Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Two title pages, with text in English and Spanish, paged separately, bound back to back and inverted.
"Two young girls, one from Boston and one from Venezuela, meet over the internet ... Together they face the trials of bullying, worries about their looks, and intense musical competitions. They are helped by each other -- and by a lovely blue butterfly ..."--Inside book flap.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Forced story about the wonders of "El Sistema", simple plot and colloquial writing style. submitted by Baradlay on October 13, 2019, 9:18pm I read this bilingual book in Spanish since this is my native language and I'm Venezuelan. The story centers around a member of "El Sistema", a program established early 80's to introduce classical music to kids in low income neighborhoods (National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras of Venezuela). Founded initially as a private sector initiative, the program grew and attracted government financing. The later has been a key factor in recent decades. Since 2001, Hugo Chavez presidency used this program as one of the facts that support the political success of socialism, an authoritarian pseudo-democracy that ended in the devastation of Venezuelan society.

The story goes simple, without mentioning any clear time frame, places or political context. The use of the image of a blue butterfly is just a vehicle to develop a plot that doesn't have a clear end. The use of literary expressions such as "laptop", "blue-jean" and "e-mail" (in the Spanish version), as well as phrases like "the double helix of DNA" denotes a terrible writing. In several pages the author butters Dudamel up so much that left the feeling he is a musical god.

The CD is just a compilation of short compositions, without mentioning who is the composer/interpreter.

I love how the AADL carefully selects the best quality on foreign language titles but this is for sure a bad outlier.