I read the book Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. It is a poetry book about two half-sisters, one named Yahaira, who lives in New York and the other named Camino, who lives in the Dominican Republic, who are unaware of each other's existence; but when their father dies in a plane crash, the aftermath reveals shocking things about him and what he was hiding from his family. The girls are left with a question: Was their father really the hero and role model they thought he was? Or do his secrets shatter the image of what everyone saw him as? As the sisters grieve and recover, they learn about each other, and resolve to meet. As they get closer, they start to realize that their stories are more similar than they ever could have imagined. This story is a beautiful narrative about two twins who seem to live such different lives, with one sister living in a suburban apartment setting, while the other lives in a poor neighborhood in the Dominican Republic, where she goes to the ocean for solace. They live in such different environments and their feelings are so different, yet they suffer in so many of the same ways, and this book shows that beautifully.
A key part of this book is centered on the supposed idea of two half-siblings living in opposite environments and with opposite personalities, but if you look closely, the girls have much more similar than you would think. One way they are similar is in the way they handle grief. They both love their father very much, and in both of their situations there is a strong sense of denial and hope that their father is still alive, right up until the news confirms that there are no survivors. Despite them both having people around them willing to hear what they have to say, they both struggle with feeling comfortable confiding in someone about all their problems and grief. These are examples of how the two girls are very similar in the way they deal with grief.
The girls are also similar in terms of their family situation. They both have a main mother figure who takes very good care of them and loves them a lot, which compensates for the loss of the father that they are missing. Yahaira has a mother is scarred by her husband's betrayal (which resulted in the other half-sister) but still does everything she can to comfort her daughter after the death. Camino has an aunt who adopted her when the Camino's mother died. Her aunt works hard as a doctor for free to all the ailing people in their poor neighborhood, and still works hard to provide for her niece. Since Camino and her aunt got most of their money from her father, who is now dead, the family is struggling even more than before. But for both of these girls, they have strong and loving mother figures who do their best to give their girls all they need and comfort them during troubling times.
One final major similarity between the half-sisters is that they both live in fear of the outside world. Yahaira is very paranoid about being in public because when she was younger, she was riding in the metro alone, and she was sexually assaulted but too scared to do anything about it. After that happened, she was too scared to go out in public in fear that something would happen again and she would be helpless. Camino is in quite a similar predicament. There is a man who lives near her house who sells young girls to men who visit the island; and before he died, Camino's (and Yahaira's) father would pay the man yearly to keep him away from Camino. But after Camino's father died, the man started following Camino around, so Camino is in trouble and she is forced to stop going out in public. This fear of the public is a major similarity between the two half-siblings.
In conclusion, though the two half-siblings seem very different on the surface, living in two different places that couldn't possibly more different and having different financial situations as well; they are a lot more similar than they think. They both handle grief in similar ways, silently suffering but struggling to find someone to confide in; they both have similar family situations and live with a prominent mother figure; and they both have a similar fear of the outside world due to bad experiences and trauma. This was a very fascinating book and it was very interesting to see each layer of the two characters unravel to show how similar they both were. This was a great book and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys deep poetry and books about grief.
- Kruthi Ramanath
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