I’ve loved Elizabeth Acevedo’s work since I was introduced to her book Poet X in grad school. I pulled out her book on a bus ride from Boston to NYC thinking I’d do some homework till I got car sick and instead I ended up being that annoying person who never turns off their seat light the entire ride. And holy shit that book was an emotional roller coaster that I was not prepared for but it was so amazing. Fast forward to today and I’m obviously not on a bus going anywhere BUT Acevedo’s new book Clap When You Land has once again left me shaken. 

Like Poet X this is a novel in verse, and it follows two young girls— Yahaira and Camino—whose lives are thrown together after a tragic plane crash kills a man who they both call their father. He is a complicated man who we only learn about through the eyes of those he’s left behind. I’m always impressed how Acevedo lets complexity live in her stories. She never tries to name something as good or bad, never tries to simplify a complicated truth. She interrogates it, and holds its feet to the fire, but she never tells the reader how to feel or what to think. And I find that that really plays out in how we learn about Yahaira and Comino’s father—a man who is also a friend, a brother, a husband, and a businessperson. While all the people he left behind are grieving, they are also forced to navigate the uncomfortable fact that one person can be so many different things to so many different people. They have to find a way to see him through both the lies he’s told and the love he’s given. 

The story is told through both girls perspectives, Yahaira in New York City & Camino living in the Dominican Republic. Acevedo writes in the authors note “I wanted to write a story that considered who matters and deserves attention in the media,” and I found that the book worked really hard to interrogate that concept of ‘who matters’. Outside of the main narrative of the book—which explores the aftermath of their fathers death—Yahaira and Camino also have to to contend with forces in their world that treat them as less than. For Yahaira in Morningside Heights it’s people like the Columbia students in her neighborhood “Who disrupt everything: clueless to our joys & pains”. For Camino it’s the tourists who come and the governments that take. 

“I am from a playground place. 

Our oceans    that we need for fish

Are cleared so extranjeros can kite surf.

Our land, lush & green, is bought 

& sold to foreign powers so that they can build

luxury hotels for others to rest their heads.

The banana & yucca & sugarcane

Farmed & harvested, exported,

While kids thank God for every little scrap.

The developed world wastes gas,

Raises carbon emissions & water levels

that threaten to disappear us in a single gulp.

Even the women, girls like me,

Our mothers & tias, our bodies

Are branded jungle gyms.

Men with accents pick us up

As if from a brochure to climb

& slide & swing.” 

Honestly this book is amazing, and should be required reading for incoming Columbia freshman, instead of the fucking Iliad. 

If you haven’t yet read this book, or any of Elizabeth Acevedo’s work for that matter, I highly highly recommend you check her out. Her writing is so beautiful and powerful and refreshing. 

Also her descriptions of food are always so on point and I love how much she uses food and cooking to show how characters care about each other. (If you’re into that then you should 100% check out one of her other books With the Fire on High)

I don’t know how I wrote an entire review of this book without mentioning Camino’s Tia and Yahaira’s girlfriend Dre but ugh they’re all so lovely and compassionate and kind. 

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