Me perdí en Medellín, by Adriana Ramirez

This is at the top of my new favorites list especially for non-native Spanish teachers who speak my dialect of Spanish — Spanish teacher Spanish— lots of high frequency words. 🙂 I was looking up words in the glossary, but everything was repeated a lot. It’s so beautifully written the words are nearly edible. It’s about a Canadian student who gets separated from his buddies and gets lost in Medellin. I think I would use it at high level 2, low level 3. It would work well as a class reader because you could inject so much background information, video clips, pictures etc. I think you’ll especially love it if you’ve been to Colombia. Reader’s theater — when he meets the cousins and gets flustered by the cheek kisses. Any book that uses babear is going to be fun, too.

This book is lovely in showing intercultural differences in communication and relationships, through the lens of a North American young man who spends the day with a new acquaintance in Medellín and finds himself feeling like part of the new acquaintance's family. Afterward, he finds that he starts to incorporate his acquaintance/friend's style of relating in his relationships with people from his home country. The book embodies interculturality and how we find ourselves as nexus points between two cultures, profoundly shaped by both, with a deeper experience of what it means to be human as a result of these experiences. I strongly recommend this book for intermediate-level readers.

Excellent book and distribution of the books.