The Fresh New Face of Griselda

Jennifer Torres's The Fresh New Face of Griselda is a gentle, honest story for 10 year olds about a girl trying to find something beautiful after her family loses their home.

What happens

Griselda Zaragoza, known to everyone as Geez, is about to start sixth grade. Last spring her dad's gardening business went under and the family lost their house. Now they're squashed into Nana's place, and Dad is six hours away looking for work.

Geez won't unpack. Every week she washes her clothes, folds them and puts them straight back in her suitcase. If she unpacks, it means they've given up.

Nana's garden is chaos. There are six old toilets planted with geraniums (one came from a neighbour!), and nobody can tell her to prune anything. Geez misses the neat garden she and Dad planted. She can't even bear to drive past their old street and see her roses growing for someone else.

Her big sister Maribel is the opposite. She's put off college to sell Alma Cosmetics door to door, and she's scarily good at it. The book opens with her talking her way into a tired new mum's flat and making a sale in fifteen minutes flat, while Geez holds the baby.

Then Geez spots a competition in one of Maribel's prize booklets. Sell 500 tubes of glittery lip gloss and win five thousand dollars. It seems impossible. But what if it could fix everything?

It's told in Geez's own voice, and you really feel how small moments can be huge when your life has been turned upside down. Plain white school shoes. Jeans that are a bit too short. A class task to draw your summer when you had no holiday at all. It's an experience that we've probably all had, wanting to hide the thing that makes you different on the first day back.

There's lots of warmth too. Geez collects teacups with American First Ladies on them, hunted out at yard sales with Nana. The neighbour boy Logan has a runaway pet snake who once turned up in one of Nana's toilet planters (Nana was NOT happy).

It's a very American book, with dollars, yard sales and sixth grade. But the feelings travel perfectly. For a reader who notices the little things and worries more than they let on, Geez will feel like a friend.

What to read next

Jennifer Torres also wrote Stef Soto, Taco Queen, and it's in the library too. Stef is desperate for her papi to stop picking her up from school in Tía Perla, the family's taco truck.