‘Return to Sender,’ by Julia Alvarez

Return to Sender

A Novel

Julia Alvarez

Alfred A. Knopf: 326 pp., $16.99

Agricultural work is unforgiving. Running a farm involves the unrelenting necessity of daily chores. Cows can’t wait to be milked; untended crops quickly fail.

One of the most engaging qualities of Julia Alvarez’s new novel for children, “Return to Sender,” is how the book immerses readers in the rhythm of farm life. But those unyielding requirements also form the hard core of this story, which introduces issues at the heart of the current political debate over immigration.

Eleven-year-old Tyler is worried about his family’s Vermont farm. Not only has his grandfather recently died, but a few weeks later, his father suffers an accident that leaves him unable to do regular work. With an older son leaving for college, the farm has lost its workforce.

Tyler wants to take a year off school to help out, but his parents won’t hear of it. They send him to visit relatives in Boston. Yet Tyler knows his family is facing circumstances in which farmers are forced to sell land that they and their ancestors have worked for generations.

Upon his return to Vermont, Tyler discovers a family of Mexicans living in the trailer behind the farmhouse. Tyler’s mother calls them “angels”; they know farm work and are very industrious. But Tyler’s parents ask him not to mention them at school, even though he will be in class with Mari, the oldest of three girls crowded into the trailer with their father and uncles.

Where is the girls’ mother? As Tyler becomes close with Mari and her family, he learns about the underground existence of people who live in fear of “la migra”: no letters, few phone calls, the danger of exposure. The mother disappeared while returning from a trip to Mexico to see her own dying mother, and no one knows what happened to her. Their only hope is a phone number left at their last address with other tenuously situated immigrants.

The title of the novel, “Return to Sender,” was also the name of a 2006 program of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that organized massive sweeps for illegal immigrants. The program caused contention because in some cases the raids stranded children -- both those born in the U.S. and those who entered the country with their parents.

There is a great deal of recent children’s fiction about immigration, but it tends to the earnest rather than the artful. Alvarez, the daughter of Dominican immigrants and for many years a writing teacher at Middlebury College, focuses on the children and their dawning comprehension of the complexities of the adult world.

Still, “Return to Sender” is not as lively as Alvarez’s other books. There is little overt politics, beyond a town meeting confrontation between the flag-waving Mr. Rossetti and a young teacher who reminds everyone that even Mr. Rossetti’s forebears came to the U.S. in search of a better life.

“Return to Sender” may best be read as a plea for treating neighbors like human beings.

Bolle’s Word Play column appears monthly at latimes.com/books.