Furia by Yamile Saied Méndez
Hi, I am Sarah. I am fourteen years old and an avid reader; it is one of my favorite things to do. Inspired by authors’ creations of magnificent places and surprising havens built by simple letters, I aspire to be an author and, meanwhile, nurture the love to write.
Camila Hassen is the cautious daughter of her timid mother and abrasive father, making as little space as she can under her brother’s rising soccer stardom. She keeps up her grades, works on her English, working on going to medical school and become un Doctora. She keeps her big mouth shut and tries not to make waves.
Until she’s on the field.
Furia, she’s called, a talented fútbolera, where her dreams explode and her feet have wings, where her world is the ball and its trajectory, where she can be anyone and do anything.
Where she can be a girl in Rosario, Argentina and play fútbol. But it isn’t that easy. In her wildest dreams, she gets to go to a school in North America on an athletic scholarship, to go on and play professionally. When her team qualifies for a South American tournament, she gets that chance… but she needs her parent’s permission, and they don’t know about, nor would they approve of the double life she leads. And to complicate things further, the boy she once loved-turned-international-soccer-player is back in town, and she can’t let herself be distracted by her feelings for him. She has one goal, and one goal only: to be La Furia in a world that doesn’t have room for a girl like her.
Yamile Saied Méndez has written a powerful story about a seventeen-year-old girl making a place for herself in a place that doesn’t want to accept her, a story of love and passion and dreams and hurt and soaring through it all, in a blur of black and white—fútbol.
