School Library Journal - 06/01/2011 Gr 1–3—Tía Isa has a dream. She wants a car, a green one like the sea in her homeland. A vehicle that can take her family to different places, maybe to the beach, which is far from their urban dwelling. The problem is that she has no extra money. Tía Isa works at the bakery, she helps support her young niece, who lives in this country, and her family back home, and her brother scoffs at her notions. Isa is determined, however, to save up and to prove her brother wrong. They will have a car soon she tells her niece, the narrator. Obtaining it becomes the child's dream as well. As she goes about her days, she finds that people are ready and willing to pay for her help and her Spanish-language skills. Before long, the two find the perfect sea-foam green car. It has no air-conditioning and a bad radio, but it's just what they need to take everyone to the beach. Done in pencil, ink, and frequently complementary watercolors, this story is a pleasant selection about ambition, resourcefulness, and never letting go of one's dreams.—Roxanne Burg, Orange County Public Library, CA - Copyright 2011 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Booklist - 06/01/2011 The title is a chanting refrain in this picture book, which tells a timeless immigration story of an extended family coming to America from the viewpoint of a young Latina girl, who shares a room with her aunt, Tía Isa, in a city tenement. Tía Isa wants a car to get to the seashore, which reminds her of the beach she left behind on her island home. She can only save a little money, though, because she is sending financial support back to her faraway family to help bring them to the U.S. Secretly, the young narrator earns cash by getting small jobs in the neighborhood, and, finally, there is enough to buy a huge, old convertible for the whole family to enjoy. Always true to the child’s viewpoint, the story shows how hard it is to be separated from loved ones and how long it can take to reunite, and the lively, unframed illustrations in pencil, watercolor, and ink extend the sense of warmth and longing, first in the small room the girl shares with her aunt, then in the climax of everyone rushing into the waves, together at last. - Copyright 2011 Booklist.

Bulletin for the Center... - 09/01/2011 Money is tight in the narrator’s household; she’s living with her uncle, Tío Andres, and his sister, Tía Isa, in a small apartment as they save up money to bring the rest of the family over from their island home. The hot city summer, however, makes Tía Isa long for the beach, and she’s determined to get a car so that the family can head out for freedom whenever they want. The protagonist chips in with money earned from small jobs around the neighborhood, and soon there’s an aqua-blue convertible in front of their building, ready “to carry us all to the sea.” Smooth, subtly creative style and evocative incidental detail make this a generous and savvy slice of life, where the family here misses the family and home on the island desperately (“A beach,” says the narrator, “has foamy water that reaches all the places I cannot go”) but are also making a good home for themselves where they are. The book echoes Williams’ A Chair for My Mother (BCCB 12/82) in both story and style, but it’s got its own sensibility as well. The picture of family life is easygoing but evocative, with Spanish words in dialogue effectively woven into the English text, and the close comradeship between the glamorous young aunt and the narrator is one that many youngsters will envy. In his illustrations, Muñoz creates our narrator’s urban world in sun-bleached watercolors, pale hues of tropical shades, touched with loose, rangy line; elements of hand-painted pattern, especially in the clothes, add energy. The convertible’s aqua is a theme from the endpapers to page borders to the sea itself, tying the book together visually; Tía Isa is a spirited stunner just ripe for hero-worshipping by the young protagonist, and the setting emerges vividly through details of baking streets and geometric lines of buildings. Kids with faraway family members will especially relate to this, but anybody who’s felt trapped at home in a hot summer will recognize the lure of freedom and the glee of an open-air drive. DS - Copyright 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.