The Lightning Queen
The Lightning Queen
By: Laura Resau
I picked up this book because the school library bought it from the book fair and I thought the cover looked interesting. (Can you sense a pattern?) After reading the inside cover, I thought it sounded similar to The Little House on the Prairie books, which I loved as a kid. I felt nostalgic.
And then I read it in less than a week. I breezed through it. The Lightning Queen was nothing like The Little House on the Prairie books. But it was a fast read, and enchanting.
On the first page I could tell that Laura Resau did not rehash Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. The narrator, Mateo, is like the boys at the school I got the book from. He likes his after school activities and his phone. But he feels the tug of old tradition—of magic. And as he is describing the tug of magic pulling him towards his vacation to Mexico to see his grandpa, I felt it too. And that tug never went away throughout the book.
I don’t (normally) care for books written in First Person—I don’t (normally) like being that submerged in the narrator’s head. There are exceptions. And The Lightning Queen is one of those exceptions. One reason it works for me in this book is that the story is broken down into different parts—different narrators. Mateo is our connection to the modern world. His parts are shorter, and like coming up for fresh air in between the longer parts narrated by his grandfather, Teo. (Not that you really need a breath of fresh air. I could have stayed in Mexico long, long ago with Teo for the entire book.)
Teo is the real main character. He needs his grandson’s help finding Esma, Queen of Lightning. She is a gypsy girl whose caravan visits his village. After her grandmother reads Teo’s true fortune, they become fast friends. I don’t want to reveal too much about Esma’s magic, but she is inspiring.
There are so many elements of this story that I love. I love that at its core it’s a story about family—about grandfathers passing on traditions. It’s a love story, too. It’s a story about friendship that stretches over years and miles. It’s about growing up, and facing life and death. It’s beautiful.
The Lightning Queen is not a genre that I would normally choose for myself. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I would recommend it to anyone.
