During the beginning of the school year my Language Arts class read The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera. This book takes place in a dystopian future where Halley’s Comet is going to hit Earth and destroy everyone living there. A corporation called the Collective created ships and are bringing people from Earth to another planet to survive. This seems like a good cause, but the Collective is not what they seem. This book was a fun read with a main theme of stories called cuentos. I actually wrote my own cuento here:
The Tooth Fairy
Retold by Connor M ~ Told by Frank S.
It is tough to be a single dad. My wife had recently passed, being sent to a plague center, to die from Tuberculosis. I was left to raise my two children by myself during the Great Depression. On the weekdays, I drop Frank and Irving at school before work, but on the weekends, I bring them out with me.
Although it is a tough time, my family is managing thanks to my job as a doctor. I go door to door treating patients, so I spend a lot of my time in the car. The kids love the long rides during the weekends. I try to make things fun by sparking their imagination.
Imagination is so important to me because as a child, you have a lot of it, but as an adult, I find that imagination is in vain. I help my children grow up imaginative by letting them believe what they want to believe.
Sometimes, when I’m driving the kids down the long roads they lose a tooth. I start to drive a little wobbly and reach out the window to bang on the roof. Suddenly, I stopped. “It’s the tooth fairy!” I yell. Excitedly, Frank and Irving get out of the car. Magically, there is candy on the roof! Frank and Irving eat their candy, and I love how they look up at the sky, looking for the tooth fairy. I really hope to spark their imagination in a way they will remember forever.
*************************************************************************************************
Because the people in the book went to another planet, I wrote an ideal world blog post here. This blog post was about my ideal world to live in. It is told like a tour of a city, but it is a planet. This was very fun to write about. I would recommend The Last Cuentista to anyone who loves science fiction.
Finally, I made a handmade book. The cover of it says “Spirit,” because the name of my ideal world is Spirit in Latin, and my cuento is about spirit and hope. These messages made making the handmade book super fun. Inside there is a platypotupus, one of my ideal world’s many creatures. This was a great project that was fairly enjoyable.
