Caperucita en Manhattan: 1 (Colección Escolar)

Lovely little re-imagining of little red riding hood set in New York in the early 90's, a magical world in which anything is possible as long as you keep your eyes open and face your fears.

Unlike most books aimed at the 10+ range, this is well written and if you rolled your eyes at the prose of Amanda Black you should find some comfort here, especially the first third or so which does a great job describing the wonder and frustrations of being a 10 year old. Apparently this is something of a classic, with good reason.

The 29 it's rated as is probably too high? maybe. I'm in one of my perpetual states of not trusting any of my ratings. The hardest vocabulary for me were words like ficha/token (for subways and such), but the writing is clear and descriptive enough that gently antiquated words like that were obvious from context. But the trade off of better writing is that the sentence structure might be a bit more complicated than other books aimed at middle school kids. I think it's more than worth it.