The journey

Short story review: The Circuit by Francisco Jiménez
10.10.2013 by Maxi Schoeppl

 

Story title: “The Circuit”

Briefly: A 12-year-old boy moves with his family to a labor camp, to earn some money. After the grape harvest he is allowed to go to school.
Afterthoughts: The reader can see the things in the perspective of a young boy. The boy really tries to get cope with everything that happens.

The story is presented in first person perspective, which makes it easy for the reader to engage with it. Because of that it is not difficult to understand what the young boy feels in this story.
The author doesn´t give much information about the setting, but we know that it takes place in the middle of the 20^th century, because the boy sais that his father bought the car in 1949.
The main character is the 12-year-old boy and he is really shy (for example: When he went to school and the teacher asked him to read out, he coulnd´t, because he was scared). The other characters are Papá and Mamá, who are the parents of the boy. The plot is chronologically sequenced and therefore really easy to understand.

Notable quote: In my opinion “The Circuit” isn´t anything special. It is a nice story about the life of a young boy whose family travels from one farm to another to earn enough money to survive.