Each Tiny Spark - Pablo Cartaya

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Emilia Torres has a wandering mind. It's hard for her to follow along at school, and sometimes she forgets to do what her mom or abuela asks. But she remembers what matters: a time when her family was whole and home made sense. Emilia expects that her life will get back to normal when Dad returns from deployment. Instead, it unravels.

Dad shuts himself in the garage to work on an old car. Emilia peeks in on him daily, mesmerized by his welder. One day, Dad calls Emilia over. Then, he teaches her how to weld. And over time, flickers of her old dad reappear.

But as Emilia finds a way to repair the relationship with her father at home, her community ruptures, with some of her classmates - like her best friend, Gus - at the center of the conflict."

📚📚📚 

Sigh. I feel like this was much-lauded, but I found it to be very lackluster. The plot was pretty aimless, and while I thought there were nice moments, overall it didn't really go anywhere. Not to mention, the synopsis is pretty misleading. Take, for example: "Emilia peeks in on him daily, mesmerized by his welder. One day, Dad calls Emilia over. Then, he teaches her how to weld. And over time, flickers of her old dad reappear." 

Yeah, she watches her dad weld from far away through Gus's camera once and then welds with him twice, both times with disastrous conversation, and then it really doesn't come up again. This is pretty much how the whole story goes - threads picked up, immediately dropped, sometimes forgotten about, others picked back up way later. I'd say the only consistent storyline was the homework assignment from her social studies teacher, and even that I found very puzzling. Her teacher? Clearly a great one. The assignment? Made no sense to me.

Maybe I could have moved past inconsistent plot if the characters were solid, but sheesh, they were all like caricatures. Clarissa, introduced at the beginning of the book as one of Emilia's best friends, is obnoxious (but also clearly positioned as an antagonist, so that's kind of to be expected). But even Emilia, her family, and Gus are pretty stereotyped. There was no nuance or real development, and there were a lot of inconsistencies. Just...meh all around. I had high hopes, and this did not deliver.