You'll learn Italian, it's about a girl who prays for a miracle, but gets a tragedy instead. The title at first made me think it was spanish, but after reading the summary of what this books was about, and it soudned interesting. AHS/CD

Carmela A. Martino's Rosa, Sola is a quiet examination of a 10-year-old Italian American girl's hope for and eventual loss of a younger sibling through a stillbirth. She has to deal with an urge to feel the baby's death was somehow her fault for wanting it too much, and at the same time watch those around her deal with the loss within their own abilities, much to her dissatisfaction. The book, clearly written for young children at the upper elementary-level, is nevertheless haunting in its descriptions of a mother's physical and mental deterioration after a difficult miscarriage. The reader is gently pulled away from this dire situation equally effecting the young Rosa through the story's rendering of a relationship she shares with a favorite uncle. He informs her while in a cemetary of his own earlier loss of a first wife, and this part of the narrative neatly tidies up and arranges for Rosa's newfound understanding of a martinet of an aunt intent on keeping her from her mother's grief. Suspect in the storytelling was its little use of mid-1960s Chicago as the story's backdrop, set at a time when the city was vibrantly in the forefront of changing American culture. Except for the naming of a popular beach along the city's lakefront early on in the exposition, no pertinent landmark is ever again mentioned, lending to the notion that the story could have taken place in any large U.S. city. This book can best be utilized in a middle school library as a type of muticultural guide to Italian culture in the United States as attested by its glossary of Italian words used throughout the story. ( )

Longing for a sibling in 1966 Chicago, fourth-grader Rosa is delighted with her mother's pregnancy, until tragedy strikes and her family struggles to deal with its grief. Thinking that their sadness is somehow her fault, Rosa wonders if her family will ever be the same again.