When two good friends in Mexico City are bullied day after day at school, one of them comes up with an ingenious solution. He will create a little golem, a golemito, from clay to exact revenge on their tormentors. And so he does — a tiny Aztec warrior who, in the tradition of golems, grows bigger and bigger and begins to spin out of control. He is, however, responsive to Nahuatl poetry, which turns out to be the key to turning him back to dust. In the interim, happily, he does his job of cutting the bullies down to size. The award-winning author and illustrators have created something very unique here. The marriage of the Latino and Jewish cultures is extremely appealing and the graphic illustrations are evocative and arresting. It should be noted that although it’s a picture book format, this is not for the usual picture book crowd; it’s geared for a third to sixth grader. It has quite a bit of text, and is, what with the whole idea of a golem, even for its older audience, fairly sophisticated. (And it is definitely not a prescription for how to handle bullies in real life!)
Recommended for ages 8- 11.
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