Papalotero

Includes author´s voice.Teresa Jones’s dreams of flying contrast sharply with her dreary, earthbound life working as a filing-clerk in a CD store, and suffering the constant nagging of her academic parents, who are outraged at her stubborn refusal to go to college. Her best friend the popular, successful and apparently happy college freshman Elena Kravchuk has the perfect prescription for Teresa’s depression: she needs to get laid. When the two girls meet Miguel Angel Ramirez, a misfit Mexican immigrant who builds and flies kites for a living, Elena goes to work as match-maker to bring him together for a casual fling with her socially awkward, chronically depressed best friend. But rather than providing a one night stand, this papalotero will transform the lives of both girls in ways that neither one bargained for: Elena will confront the truth that her life is not as perfect as she so desperately wants people to believe it is, while Teresa will be challenged to give up her low self-esteem and Life Sucks t-shirts, and discover that the happiness she thinks is out of her reach might actually be just one small leap of faith away.