Books by this author
 
  In Wisconsin, Rico could blend in. His light hair and lighter skin wouldn’t make him the “dark dude” or the punching bag for the whole neighborhood. Trading Harlem for Wisconsin, though, means giving up on a big part of his identity. And when Rico no longer has to prove that he’s Latino, he almost stops being one — except there are some things that can’t be left behind.
Dark Dude
              Oscar Hijuelos          
  
  Age Level: 
          Middle Grade      Genre: 
          Fiction      Published: 
              2006
          Product Description:  Born in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. During a sojourn in pre-Castro Cuba with his mother, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved. With a cast of characters whose stories are both funny and tragic, Thoughts Without Cigarettes follows Hijuelos’s subsequent quest for his true identity into adulthood, through college and beyond — a mystery whose resolution he eventually discovers hidden away in the trappings of his fiction.
      
        Book Details 
      Thoughts without Cigarettes: A Memoir
              Oscar Hijuelos