Salvador's Children: A Song for Survival

This modest, affecting tale focuses on both Maria, the eight-year-old Salvadoran adopted by the pseudonymous Marenn, an American academic and single mother, and on Marenn's attempt to reconstruct her daughter's past. The book's first section, chronicling the author's 1984 trip to El Salvador to meet Maria, frequently lapses into gringa guilt but captures chilling details: Maria develops a rash at the sight of a uniform. In the second section, Marenn begins with a message to Maria's dead mother, then describes a daughter who expresses her bad dreams in Spanglish and asks unanswerable questions: ``Mama, why are we in this world, if we kill each other?'' As Maria begins to unburden her memories, finding disturbing resonance in images from Brueghel, her mother studies the war in El Salvador. Though this final section borrows heavily from press reports, it has a touching conclusion: at the Library of Congress Marenn and Maria discover a newspaper photo of Maria's mother that accompanied her obituary in 1982. (Feb.)