Margarita Engle’s Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal (260 pages, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) has been chosen as one of the 30 Best Multicultural Books of 2014.

Each year, a select diverse committee of experts from the Center for the Study of Multicultural Children’s Literature (CSMCL) identifies the best in multicultural books. The mission of the CSMCL is to provide children, teachers, parents, educators, students, and librarians access to multicultural children’s books with high literary and artistic standards. Other authors chosen this year include Jacqueline Woodson, Kwame Alexander, Catherine Reef, Isabel Quintero, Roseanne Greenfield Thong, and Susan Middleton Elya.

Here is a description of Silver People: One hundred years ago, the world celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, which connected the world’s two largest oceans and signaled America’s emergence as a global superpower. It was a miracle, this path of water where a mountain had stood—and creating a miracle is no easy thing. Thousands lost their lives, and those who survived worked under the harshest conditions for only a few silver coins a day.

From the young “silver people” whose back-breaking labor built the Canal to the denizens of the endangered rainforest itself, this is the story of one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken, as only Newbery Honor-winning author Margarita Engle could tell it.

Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American winner of the first Newbery Honor ever awarded to a Latino. Her award winning young adult novels in verse include The Surrender Tree, The Poet Slave of Cuba, Tropical Secrets, and The Firefly Letters. Engle’s most recent books are Silver People: Voices From the Panama Canal and Tiny Rabbit’s Big Wish. Both were released in 2014.

For full list, see http://www.alsc.ala.org/blog/2014/12/best-multicultural-books-of-2014/

For purchasing information, see http://www.amazon.com/Silver-People-Voices-Panama-Canal/dp/0544109414

See the author’s page at http://www.margaritaengle.com/