The characters featured in TORO by Andrew Avner are utterly charming. First, there’s Alicía Catalina Cortés, a feisty Spanish cow, who easily outraces all eight of her brothers. Every summer Pamplona, Spain holds the fiesta of San Fermín — a nine-day Festival of the Bull — with the essence of the celebration known as encierro, the running of bulls through 800-meters of Pamplona’s cobbled streets. This all leads towards a grand ball in a giant ring of sand where six chosen bulls will dance with matadors and then get to go to a Great Ranch in the Sky. Alicía knows she is meant to be there, but as a cow her fate is supposedly to just marry and breed.
Across the ranch, the dashing Diego Del Toro is destined for the events of San Fermín, when all he really wants is to steer wrestle and barrel race at American rodeos. This beautiful story weaves valuable lessons about the importance of focusing frequently upon impossible dreams, while either totally ignoring or intently taking into consideration just how they might come to pass. (The sidekicks giving advice humorously disagree on this point.) There’s a bit of subterfuge with Jesús, the hog who finagles himself a role as Diego’s future rodeo manager for 10% of Diego’s food rations, along with a lie Alicía tells Diego in order to obtain his help towards achieving her objective (while trying not to fret whether a goal noble and brave can be achieved if it’s based on deceit).
Diego’s arch enemy and Alicía’s potential mate, the elder Don Julián fumes with appropriately visceral fury. The subtle specter of what future really awaits most bulls that make it to the end of the festival looms in the background, perfectly ominous. In fact, besides a few typos, there’s basically only one flaw to this otherwise flawless tale…but it’s a big one. In order to take part in the fiesta of San Fermín, Alicía’s friends plan to disguise her as Diego. They are similar in height, weight, build, and share almost identical brands, the unique identifier of which can be (painfully) made to match. Whereas Diego is black and Alicía is gray, a good pig-inspired wallow in mud can take care of that. But with all these efforts, it still isn’t believable that no one notices Alicía is a girl until very late in the story; not family members, not eagle-eyed suitor Don Julián, not the humans transporting Alicía-pretending-to-be-Diego.
TORO is classified as an early-to-middle reader, though the language is much too advanced for children just learning to read. So, practically speaking, its audience will be middle readers aged around 10 – twelve-ish. And kids of that age are already quite aware of what body parts differentiate boys from girls (especially these days).
Great messages for young people of love, acceptance, gender empowerment, honesty, friendship, and going after what one wants abound in TORO, Andrew Avner’s one-of-a-kind, animal-populated novel for middle readers.
~C.S. Holmes for IndieReader