Lost in Caracas

Doriela Mendoza learns to be needed long before she learns to be wanted. In Los Palos Grandes, Caracas, she is five years old and already rationing her good deeds, saving them up for the evenings her father comes home with his face closed.

Then the country comes apart. At ten she leaves all of it: the apartment, the language, her grandmother, the version of herself that was allowed to be a child. Colombia, then Aruba, then Orlando, where four of them start again on somebody else's furniture with a case number and no answer.

She is the eldest. She has the best English. By eleven she is the one who speaks to America on her family's behalf: the forms, the appointments, the diagnoses, the bad news, in two languages.

Lost in Caracas is the first book in The Dori Trilogy, a story about the children who become the translators, and what it costs to be the one everybody can count on.