FILLED WITH HOPE: The Young Life of Margaret Castro

What makes this opening work is Margaret herself — she's not a plaster saint-in-training, she's a real eight-year-old who lies about the change from the rice ("No. I looked right at her, keeping my face calm. It wasn't a lie"), throws a kickball at Juan's head for calling her Miss Priss, and also quietly gives away her favorite grape lollipop to a hungry cousin she's just met without telling anyone, including the reader upfront. That quiet generosity — 'It didn't need to be told' — is the book's best trick: it shows Margaret's calling through action before she or anyone else can name it, which pays off nicely against Carmen's gentle skepticism ('Every little Catholic girl thinks they want to be a nun... You will too'). The push-pull between a child's certainty and the adults who love her but can't see her yet is genuinely affecting, especially in the church scenes where she mistakes Father Anderson for Jesus and then keeps showing up to early Mass anyway, disappointed but 'stubborn.'

The period world-building carries real texture too — the tortilla holder, the lollipop jar 'glowing like a treasure chest,' the Formica table with its salt-pepper-sugar trio, the adobe bell tower that's now the entrance to the 5 Freeway. Old Town San Diego in 1947 feels lived-in rather than researched, and the Catholic ritual detail (Latin Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, the Act of Contrition) is handled with the specificity of someone who's actually sat in those pews. For readers drawn to faith-inflected biographical fiction about girls who don't fit the mold set for them, this earns its audience.