Two sisters separated by an ocean share a connection that links their lives beyond borders. In Elizabeth Acevedo’s third novel in verse, Clap When You Land, Camino and Yahaira Rios discover each other’s existence after their father’s passing on Flight 1112 from New York to the Dominican Republic.

It’s a beautiful summer day in the Dominican Republic when Camino arrives at the airport to crowds of crying people. Her excitement over her father’s annual summer arrival is immediately replaced with dread. Soon, her fears are confirmed. The flight her father takes every year ended abruptly over the Atlantic Ocean and Papi is gone.

Back in New York City, Yahaira is withdrawn from her class and met by her mother in the principal’s office and receives devastating news.

But his death is only the beginning for Camino and Yahaira. Their stories are told separately in alternating chapters and each chapter poetically navigates their experiences with grief. Acevedo is masterful with her word choice and rhythm, and each stanza oozes emotion. Both of the girls realize Papi’s death symbolizes the end of their life as they knew it. For Camino who has grown up with Tia on the island after the death of her mother, relying on Papi’s money to attend private school and learn English, life as she knows it is gone, and the threat of never reaching her dreams of Columbia pre-med becomes a very real possibility. The threat of remaining on the island, and falling prey to El Cero, a man her father bribed to leave Camino alone while he was alive, is a tragic reminder that she does not have true control of her destiny. Acevedo exquisitely describes Camino’s despair at the loss of both her father and her future:

Dreams are like the pieces of fluff that get caught in your hair; they stand out for a moment, but eventually, you wash them away, or long fingers reach in & pluck them out & you appear as what everyone expects.

As Camino is reminded of the fickleness of dreams, Yahaira struggles to reconcile the Papi she loved as a young girl – the man who taught her the game of chess, the man whose energy was always bigger than the room – with the man she discovered by accident. A year before Papi’s death, Yahaira discovered the marriage license between Papi and a woman in the Dominican Republic – a woman who was not her mother. Upon his return at the end of the summer, Yahaira refused to talk to him, and she never spoke another word to him before his death.

Her fury and frustration with her father’s secrecy were amplified by his death. As tension rose over the burial of his body on the island, she waited and dreaded when one of the adults in her life would confirm what she already knew – her father’s double life. The one with her and her mom, and the other on the island he flew to every summer.

The journey of discovery for the Rios sisters leads to an exploration of what it means to uncover secrets, family, and the depths of one’s own inner strength in the face of great loss and gain. Acevedo is strongest when painting a picture of both loss and love. The sisters, despite their trepidation of the other, discover quickly that their bond is not simply skin-deep. Their love and loss of their father are real, and so is their potential for true sisterhood. This is demonstrated in the final scenes of the book when not only Yahaira but her mother and Tia work together to rescue Camino from the threat of the island’s underbelly.

Sisterhood doesn’t simply rely on bloodlines. Like the villages it takes to raise children, sisterhood can traverse bloodlines and borders to save lives.

Pick up Clap When You Land and immerse yourself in the rhythmic and profound storytelling from Acevedo’s latest work of art.