i think because my my best friend who lived two blocks away was rj palacio, who wrote wonder. right. that, you know, international sensation. and i think there was a for a while a woman named maria russo who used to be the editor of the book review of four children at the new york times, also was from flushing, queens. so i don't know, something good was happening in flushing. what did i read? what did we read? i read a lot of nancy drew. i read a lot of judy blume. i read a lot of those books of of the seventies when we were kids. a lot of greek mythology. thanks to raquel, we used to act these things out all the time. i didn't have in those pages a lot of latino characters and it didn't stop me from reading. but i will say that later in high school and in college, when i did tap into sandra cisneros house on mango street and start to discover latino writers, it was like a revelation. that people that ate the food that was on my kitchen table and sounded like the and usually espagnole and all these things that that was worthy of being in a book. and i'm sad that it took that

i think because my my best friend who lived two blocks away was rj palacio, who wrote wonder. right. that, you know, international sensation. and i think there was a for a while a woman named maria russo who used to be the editor of the book review of four children at the new york times, also was from flushing, queens. so i don't know, something good was happening in flushing. what did i read? what did we read? i read a lot of nancy drew. i read a lot of judy blume. i read a lot of those books of of the seventies when we were kids. a lot of greek mythology. thanks to raquel, we used to act these things out all the time. i didn't have in those pages a lot of latino characters and it didn't stop me from reading. but i will say that later in high school and in college, when i did tap into sandra cisneros house on mango street and start to discover latino writers, it was like a revelation. that people that ate the food that was on my kitchen table and sounded like the and usually espagnole and all these things that that was worthy of being in a book. and i'm sad that it took that