Postcard For Reader

Guest Post: Yvonne Prinz

Swinging by today is Yvonne Prinz! Yvonne is the author of The Vinyl Princess and the new All You Get Is Me.

A summer of love, loss, and justice.

Things were complicated enough for Roar, even before her father decided to yank her out of the city and go organic. Suddenly, she’s a farm girl, albeit a reluctant one, selling figs at the farmers’ market and developing her photographs in a ramshackle shed. Caught between a troublemaking sidekick named Storm, a brooding, easy-on-the-eyes L.A. boy, and a father on a human rights crusade that challenges the fabric of the farm community, Roar is going to have to tackle it all—even with dirt under her fingernails and her hair pulled back with a rubber band meant for asparagus.
The Politics Of Food In All You Get Is Me
I’ve always been a food person. I went organic long before organic was de rigueur, even if it meant driving to far flung farmer’s markets at ungodly early hours. And then, naturally, I became a locavore, easy enough in California, I know, but it went deeper than that for me. I’ve always wanted to know the source of my food. How it got from a farm somewhere to my table became of great concern to me, especially when I started to understand that the agricultural labor force in this country is comprised primarily of undocumented workers.

Nothing turns me off a book faster than an obvious “message” revealing itself clumsily, shortly after I’ve started reading, but I grew to understand that there’s a vast difference between a book with a “message” and a book that tells a story in an observational way, allowing the reader to decide for themselves what’s right and what’s wrong. Or, even better, I like a grey area, where a reader has to really think about what they would do if they were in your character’s situation.

Another pet peeve of mine in YA literature is authors who create a narrator from a culture not their own. I would never presume I know enough about, for instance, a Migrant Farm Worker, to actually speak as one. So when I set out to write “All You Get Is Me”, I wanted to write about a girl from the city who is immersed into farm culture against her will and learns about the politics of food as the reader learns along with her. Roar (Aurora) resents her father for buying the farm but she has no choice but to help out and she comes to learn about the life of the Mexican farm workers first hand by working alongside them. Roar soon learns that the workers have no rights or benefits, that some of them live in their cars or camp out on the edges of farm property or share overcrowded trailers in Colonias where the living conditions are brutal. She learns that they send all the money they earn back to their families and she sees the ugly racism that immediately bubbles to the surface of her little town when her father convinces Tomas, whose wife was killed in a car accident, to sue the American woman responsible.

The nucleus of the story is food. The farmers who struggle to grow it and get it to market and the workforce they hire to harvest it have ignited an unprecedented political division in this country. I chose not to write about that as the big picture, though. Instead, I used it as the backdrop for the story of one girl, living on a farm in a small town in California who has a very very interesting summer.