In Eloísa’s Musical Window, we meet a young girl in a white dress and chancletas – with dark, chin-length hair adorned in a red bow. Her name is Eloísa, and she adores music.
But, as award-winning author Margarita Engle writes, Eloísa’s family was so poor that they could not afford a radio of their own. So Eloísa spends much of her time at home, by the window, listening to the music that floats in from a neighbor’s house. Adding to this music are the natural, wild melodies all around her Cuban town – from parrots and doves to songbirds.
The music is enough to make Eloísa want to dance, but she is shy. Unlike her Mamá, who would have gone outside to move to the rhythms. But Eloísa’s mother is sick with a mysterious illness.
Out now from Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Eloísa’s Musical Window is a tenderhearted story about a girl and her family finding joy in music. Featuring gorgeous illustrations by John Parra, the picture book was inspired by stories from Engle’s mother.
Engle spoke with Latinx in Publishing about her mother, who she dedicated Eloísa’s Musical Window to, writing about Cuba, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Amaris Castillo: Congratulations on Eloísa’s Musical Window. I understand it is based on stories your mother told you. Can you tell us more about her?
Margarita Engle (ME): She’s 94 now and she has advanced Alzheimer’s at this point, so this was probably the last story about her childhood that she told me before she got very sick.
She was born in the town of Trinidad, on the south central coast of Cuba. It’s a very old-fashioned town that has been preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage site. When my mother was a teenager, National Geographic had an article with photographs of her town. And my father, who was an artist in Los Angeles, saw the photographs and decided he wanted to go paint there. So he traveled to that town, which was actually very hard to reach at the time. They met on his first day there, which happened to be Valentine’s Day. And they fell in love and got married, even though they couldn’t speak the same language. They were married over 70 years. They moved to Los Angeles, where I was born and raised.
I had a chance to visit her relatives during the summers when I was a child, until the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, of course, travel restrictions divided the family. I didn’t get to go back until I was an adult, but I have gone back many times since then.
When my mother talked about not being able to afford a radio, I’d known she was raised poor, but I didn’t realize it was poor enough in the 1930s to not be able to afford a radio. I knew that her mother had malaria. My grandmother – who lived until 104 – had recurring malaria throughout her life. And my grandfather, even though I never had a chance to meet him because he died young, raised pigeons in their courtyard garden. I didn’t realize until my mother told me this story that the pigeons were for pigeon soup, which was the prescription for a malaria cure at the time…
The happy part of this story was that my mother listened to the neighbor’s music. Eventually, street performers started to practice in front of that window and she was able to hear the live music. That just struck me as such a beautiful thing to focus on. This was right after the pandemic that she was telling me this story, and so it was very fresh in my mind of what it feels like to be stuck indoors and that she had this wonderful way of listening to music.
I visualized the story with the animals because, at that time, I knew my great-uncle was a dairy farmer and would take the cow from window to window to deliver fresh milk. I thought those kinds of things would be fun for children now, to imagine a kind of old-fashioned style of life.
AC: There’s something so vivid about that scene, and it kicks off the story and all the other natural sounds and music Eloísa hears. How did you determine which sounds would filter in through your character’s window?
ME: I just kind of visualized and listened to the town in my mind. I know this town very well, and they still use a lot of horses and donkeys there because of the severe fuel shortages in Cuba. The streets are cobblestone, so the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the street is very typical. They don’t deliver the milk by leading the cows through town anymore, but there’s still lots of little dogs and cats.
I love the way John Parra, the illustrator, added a little green bird that follows the girl on every page of this book. It was just a treat to see how he would illustrate it. I had already written the sounds in, and he added his own touches.
AC: You dedicate the book to your mother. What was it like to work on this book with her in mind?
ME: As we were approaching publication, I knew that there was a chance she might not understand that it was really about her. But when it came out, I read her the Spanish edition and she really enjoyed it and got excited. At first she understood that she was the girl in the story. But a few minutes later, she had forgotten that, so I could start over and she’d enjoy it again. Whether she continues to remember that this is about her or not, I do know that she enjoys it.
One of the interesting things about Alzheimer’s is that music is the last memory to be lost. So songs and music from her childhood are still very much able to cheer her up, and give her a chance to interact in a way that conversation might not.
AC: Eloísa’s Musical Window is the latest addition to your many works rooted in Cuba. What message do you want to give about the country itself through this book?
ME: I wanted the reader to be left with a sense of joy, of fun and of the beauty of music. And also with empathy for someone who is poor and can’t afford something. I think children now might not be able to relate to the idea of a radio because they get music from so many other sources, but I’m sure they can visualize not having the latest model computer, or the latest video game. There might be children who don’t have a phone or a laptop available to them, so they don’t always have access to everything that their friends are talking about. But the joy comes first, and the empathy might be for a slightly older child. I really wanted just that fun of the rhythms and the lyrical language of poetry, because I think of poetry as music.
“One of the interesting things about Alzheimer’s is that music is the last memory to be lost. So songs and music from her childhood are still very much able to cheer her up, and give her a chance to interact in a way that conversation might not.”
AC: I love that photo of your mother in the book. What did you think about how John illustrated her for the story?
ME: It’s wonderful. It’s perfect. She had that little short haircut, and kind of a mischievous face in that photo. There’s actually about 100 people in that picture. There was a big family group at a picnic, and they had taken a photo of a whole bunch of people. My great-grandmother is standing behind her in the part that you see in the book. But that cat that she’s holding, she’s smiling because she had just grabbed it away from a little boy sitting there in front of her. He doesn’t show up in the picture here, but he was crying.
AC: No wonder she had that look on her face.
ME: She was quite mischievous, yes.
AC: What do you hope readers take away from Eloísa’s Musical Window?
ME: The joy and the empathy were the first things I thought of, but at the end of the book there’s also a couple of pages about Cuban musical instruments. I thought it might be something that would help them be curious about Caribbean music – not just Cuban music. And they might listen to some music and learn about the different instruments. If they had a chance, they might even try to play some drums or maracas.
I hope that everybody enjoys poetry as a form of music. I hope that any teachers who use this book will help the children enjoy poetry as a form of music, by asking them how it makes them feel rather than getting them to try and analyze it in any way. Especially with young children, I think it’s just for fun.
Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of many verse novels, including Wild Dreamers, long listed for the National Book Award, and The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor Book. Other awards include Pura Belpré Medals, Walter Honors, Américas Awards, Jane Addams Award, PEN U.S.A., and the NSK Neustadt Prize. Margarita served as the national 2017-2019 Young People’s Poet Laureate. Her most recent picture book is Eloísa’s Musical Window, and her next verse novel is Island Creatures. Margarita was born in Los Angeles, but developed a deep attachment to her mother’s homeland during childhood summers with relatives on the island. She studied agronomy and botany along with creative writing, and now lives in central California with her entomologist husband and soccer playing Border Collie.
John Parra’s illustrations for Frida Kahlo and Her Animalitos, written by Monica Brown, earned the book a New York Times Best Illustrated Book designation. He also illustrated Green Is a Chile Pepper: A Book of Colors by Roseanne Thong, which received a Pura Belpré Honor and the Américas Book Award: Commended; Marvelous Cornelius: Hurricane Katrina and the Spirit of New Orleans by Phil Bildner, which won the Golden Kite Award for Picture Book Illustration and was a Bank Street Best Book of the year; and Hey, Wall, by Susan Verde, which School Library Journal called “a must-purchase” in a starred review. Learn more at JohnParraArt.com.
Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family.
