Your school and classroom can participate in One City One Book: San Francisco Reads 2006! During 2005, more than 1,000 high school students participated in the San Francisco Public Library’s first One City One Book, reading and discussing China Boy, and listening to author Gus Lee in person. In 2006, we hope that more teens will discover and participate in our city’s fabulous book club.

The San Francisco Public Library is thrilled to announce the selection of the highly-acclaimed The Humming Bird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea as the featured title for One City One Book: San Francisco Reads 2006, our citywide book club.

Winner of the 2006 Kiriyama Prize for fiction, The Hummingbird's Daughter, set in the decades before the 1910 Mexican revolution, is a luminous novel about Teresita, a Mexican “Joan of Arc” coming to terms with her destiny as a healer, with the miraculous, and with the power of faith. Full of cowboys and outlaws, Indian warriors and cantina beauties, silly men and desert women who in their dreams travel to the seashore, The Hummingbird's Daughter is Urrea's majestic masterpiece, the story of one girl's life and the swollen heart of all Mexico.

Here are a few ways that your school can participate in One City One Book:

About The Hummingbird’s Daughter, the San Francisco Chronicle says, “Like the patriarch of the form, Gabriel García Márquez, Urrea knows how to mix the magical and the realistic in just the right proportions without making the story seem labored or inane. Urrea has created a classic, a tribute and love song to the colorful and vibrant heart of all things Mexican.”

The just-released paperback edition of the book contains historical background and a reading group guide, and we will be creating extensive materials to help facilitate discussion about this engaging book (available late summer 2006). We will also be arranging book discussions and special events in libraries, schools, and bookstores throughout San Francisco during September and October.

We’d love to hear your ideas, to answer your questions, and to learn about how you are involving your school and classroom in One City One Book. For more information and to request materials (bookmarks, posters, discussion guides) for your classroom or school library please contact Rosie Levy Merlin, One City One Book Program Manager, at rmerlin@sfpl.org or 415.557.4295.

We appreciate your help in making One City One Book: San Francisco Reads 2006 an exciting and engaging program for San Francisco’s teens!