It's April 1969, and fourteen-year-old Yolanda Sahagun can hardly wait to see her favourite brother, Chuy, newly returned from Vietnam. But when he arrives at the Welcome Home party the family has prepared in his honour it's clear that the war has changed him. The transformation of Chuy is only one of the challenges that Yolanda and the rest of her family face. This powerful coming-of-age novel, winner of the 1999 Chicano/Latino Literary Contest, is a touching and funny account of a summer that is still remembered as a crossroads in American life. Yolanda and her brothers and sisters learn how to be men and women and how to be Americans as well as Mexican Americans.