Lucia the Luchadora

I can't keep up with my son's obsessions. For a little while, it was superheroes. Sometimes it still is superheroes? But also it's robots, and Aladdin.

I've had “Lucia the Luchadora” on my TBR since well before he was born, and this weekend at the library (while looking for robot books, natch) I saw it and snatched it up. I told Ethan I wanted to check it out, and he told me it wasn't about robots. But he allowed me to read it to him anyway, and then we brought it home. (Along with like six robot books.)

See Lucia wants to play superheroes, and run around the playground, and is just as good at BAM and KA-POW as the boys, even as those boys tell her that girls can't be superheroes. Lucia's abuela shows her her own luchadora costume from her girlhood, complete with shiny mask and cape, and so Lucia goes back to the playground in her lucha libre costume, and eventually more masked luchadores show up, and it's not until Lucia unveils herself that she realizes that many of the other costumed kids are also girls who just want to play superheroes without those boys taunting them.

And I hope this is a good message for Ethan. I had a conversation with him when he was much younger, about how both boys and girls can play with cars, after he tried to tell me that only boys can play with them. He still tells me every once in a while, “boys and girls can play with cars!” so I can only hope that, with the help of books like this (and watching “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” all the time, which features Ghost Spider/Gwen Stacy), that he knows that boys AND girls can do all sorts of things.