{Synopsis} – Wanted: One amazing forever home for one amazing sixth grader.
“My name is Gaby, and I’m looking for a home where I can invite my best friend over and have a warm breakfast a couple of times a week. Having the newest cell phone or fancy clothes isn’t important, but I’d like to have a cat that I can talk to when I’m home alone.”
Gaby Ramirez Howard loves volunteering at the local animal shelter. She plays with the kittens, helps to obedience train the dogs, and writes adoption advertisements so that the strays who live there can find their forever homes: places where they’ll be loved and cared for, no matter what.
Gaby has been feeling like a bit of a stray herself, lately. Her mother has recently been deported to Honduras and Gaby is stuck living with her inattentive dad. She’s confident that her mom will come home soon so that they can adopt Gaby’s favorite shelter cat together. When the cat’s original owners turn up at the shelter, however, Gaby worries that her plans for the perfect family are about to fall apart.
{My thoughts} – Gaby is a sweet little girl that got dealt a terrible hand in life. A few years before the book starts her mom and dad split up and her dad leaves. A few months before the book starts her mother is deported back to Honduras when she goes to work on a day that she wasn’t scheduled. The place where she worked was raided and she was deported. Since her mom got sent back to Honduras that left her caregiver to be her father. He moves in with her and more or less treats her as an inconvenience. Not to mention he can’t keep a job and barely keeps food in her belly.
When her mom was deported she was originally suppose to go live with her best friend Alma and her family. However, her dad wouldn’t allow it. Instead he made her stay with him where she was hardly being cared for. Because of the way he was caring for her she was bullied and treated poorly by a number of students at school.
Gaby’s class takes on a project where they help out at a local shelter. She gets to write profiles for all the animals as a means to help them find their forever homes. While she is volunteering there with her class she becomes attached to a cat named Feather.
The majority of the book is about her time helping at the shelter and her desire to get her mom back home. I think that her helping at the shelter really helped her grow as a person with a better understanding of everything that’s going on within her life. The work that she does at the shelter seems to help her deal with all the pain from losing her mom.
I really recommend this book for any child because it’s a great book. It’s well written and given the current events taking place it really has the potential to hit home with many of the children reading it. It’s about being scared, about fear and about finding understanding in a situation that is beyond any one child’s complete understanding. I look forward to reading more books by this author in the future.
Final Conclusion: 5 Star Rating.
