SuitabookEl Lector
William Durbin
- Reading
- Consider reading alongside a conversation about work, education and fairness. Pause when Bella’s aunt is arrested or the lectores are replaced to discuss how these events affect Bella’s family and ambition.
- Themes
- Stories and civic voice: Bella dreams of becoming a lector, following her grandfather’s role reading to cigar workers; lectores also read political and union material. The book presents this favourably.
- Family duty and personal ambition: Bella leaves the path towards high school to work in a cigar factory and help support her mother and four siblings, while retaining her ambition. The situation places duty and aspiration in tension, but does not establish whether the book ultimately prioritises one over the other.
- Workers, institutions and power: The story is set among Cuban-American cigar workers during the Depression, amid emerging unions, political corruption and the removal of lectores from factories. The book’s stance on this remains unclear.
- Worth knowing
- Be aware that the story includes poverty, a child taking a job instead of going to high school, labour unrest, political corruption, an arrest after a union meeting and threats to family stability.