A big boy with a big heart

I’m not saying my school is perfect, but we don’t seem to have the quintessential bullying problem you often read about in books about middle school. We do have a lot of kids who look older or younger than they are and get treated in ways that aren’t appropriate to their age.

That is the problem Marcus Vega faces in Pablo Cartaya’s Marcus Vega Doesn’t Speak Spanish.  Marcus is big for his age and people expect him to be a bully. But he is a kid with a big heart and finds a way to use this expectation to his advantage: he charges kids to protect them from the real bully. It works well, until it doesn’t.

Publisher’s Summary: Marcus Vega is six feet tall, 180 pounds, and the owner of a premature mustache. When you look like this and you’re only in the eighth grade, you’re both a threat and a target.

After a fight at school leaves Marcus facing suspension, Marcus’s mom decides it’s time for a change of environment. She takes Marcus and his younger brother to Puerto Rico to spend a week with relatives they don’t remember or have never met. But Marcus can’t focus knowing that his father–who walked out of their lives ten years ago–is somewhere on the island.

So begins Marcus’s incredible journey, a series of misadventures that take him all over Puerto Rico in search of his elusive namesake. Marcus doesn’t know if he’ll ever find his father, but what he ultimately discovers changes his life. And he even learns a bit of Spanish along the way.