Gary Soto is at heart a poet; everything he writes is overflowing with the vivid details of everyday life. Soto takes joy in the little things--remembered smells, voices in the distance, the pull of muscle when working. Growing up in a working class Mexican-American background in Fresno, California, in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, he has taken that milieu and that geographical region for the subject of much of his writing. Soto, in his twenty books of poetry and prose for adults, and his nearly thirty books for young readers, has demonstrated a "seemingly total recall of his youth," as Suzanne Curley remarked in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Writing in the Bloomsbury Review, Alicia Fields commented, "Soto's remembrances are as sharply defined and appealing as bright new coins," further adding, "[h]is language is spare and simple yet vivid." Soto has garnered such prestigious honors as...