If you teach heritage speakers, or Spanish 3, 4, 5, or AP Spanish, you need to get this book into your students’ hands. El libro salvaje, by Mexican author Juan Villoro, was published in Mexico and has been around since 2008, but Spanish teachers in the United States may not be aware of it. It’s an interesting story and valuable for Spanish students—a compelling tale with mystery and light romance that encourages reading. What’s not to love? I read this book with an adult I am tutoring in Spanish and it helped him immensely. Then I read it again, and again; making notes all along the way.

I recommend getting this novel at least for your classroom library and perhaps for whole class reading with level 4. The protagonist is a 13-year-old boy with a very smart girlfriend. The reading level seems right for high level 3, as well as for level 4 or 5 Spanish students or native speakers.

I used to recommend the Harry Potter books in Spanish to help with grammar acquisition, and I even wrote a book to help students with it, Read Harry Potter in Spanish.  Those books are a good way to get students to pick up grammar painlessly because they are told from an omniscient narrator that explains how everyone is scheming and thinking about what everyone else wants, so there are many instances of the subjunctive.

But El libro salvaje has even more of that interwoven into an engaging story.

This novel will appeal to students and as they read they will pick up amazing amounts of grammar. As Stephen Krashen has observed:

“Acquisition of the subjunctive was related to the amount of free voluntary reading done in Spanish, not to amount of study, including specific study of the subjunctive, or length of residence in a Spanish-speaking country.”

―Stephen Krashen (2001). Free Voluntary Reading, p. 27

According to this study, the only significant predictor of the ability to use the subjunctive was the amount of free voluntary reading done in Spanish; not the amount of formal study of Spanish, not the amount of study specifically aimed at the subjunctive, and not even how long subjects had lived in a Spanish-speaking country. Those were not significant predictors of subjunctive competence. Reading was.

We may still need to teach some aspects of grammar overtly, but frequent reading at the right level will make all aspects of grammar more comprehensible. Reading will make it stick with students. Novels are the way to go because they are enjoyable. Reading a novel is different than studying, and students pick up more useful grammar as they read. It’s a win/win.

The advanced grammar intertwined in El libro salvaje will get your students to understand and use grammar that they would otherwise have to painfully slog through. That’s what happened with my Spanish students with Harry Potter, and it happened again before my eyes with my adult student. As my mentor, Susan Gross used to say: “Shelter vocabulary, not grammar. 

Here are a few delights found in the book:

• The protagonist does not like to read. He mentions several times that he doesn’t really like to read and that he is not a good student. His kindly uncles assures him that this is OK because a book will choose him. And Juan (the main character) does have a few books that he likes to read over and over.

• There are 113 uses of “como si…” expressions. These sayings use the past subjunctive and often express imaginary ideas or statements contrary to fact, usually with valuable metaphors. Those 113 expressions cannot be happenstance. The author is training readers to compare concrete events and observations with counterfactual ideas in their minds—a valuable habit to instill in students. It expands their thinking. Rather than distracting, these como si… expressions enrich the story immensely.

• There are 621 uses of the subjunctive in the story. That’s about three times per page. A bit obsessive of me to actually count them, to be sure, but I was introducing the subjunctive to my tutee and assuring him that simply by reading he would begin to pick it up—and he has.

• There are 23 “darse cuenta de…” expressions. The author seems to want readers to realize some things they hadn’t before.

• It encourages more reading because, 1) it takes place in a library, 2) the eponymous character of the story, el libro salvaje, is a book that cannot be tamed and we want to find out what that means, and 3) it alludes to many well-known authors and their works from both the English and Spanish-speaking worlds. The authors Jorge Luís Borges, Julio Cortazar, Dante, Heraclites and Eratosthenes are all mentioned. And these books are mentioned: Moby Dick, Metamorphosis, The Rights of Man, 1oo1 Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes.

• The potential errors of technology and modernity are mentioned 8 times — something to keep in mind in our headlong embrace of anything new that may be helping us and may be hurting us.

• The story alludes to the “otherness” that many of us (and especially teenagers) often feel. The protagonist and the uncle in the story frequently compare themselves to the ornitorrinco (duckbilled platypus)—an eccentric animal that defies classification. This happens at least 10 times in the story.

• My favorite chapter is La historia que cuenta un libro no siempre es igual, because who hasn’t read a book and got something entirely different when reading it again? I’ve often discussed a book with a friend who picked up completely different messages from it than I did. Haven’t we all?

• These lines from the end of the book have stuck with me:

En los momentos de angustia en que me sentí más solo, los libros fueron mis compañeros. Desde entonces han estado conmigo en las buenas y en las malas.

In these times when reading holds less appeal for many students, we need to get compelling and valuable books like this into their hands so that books can become their companions in good times and in bad.