Las puertas retorcidas is a textbook unlike most: students will actually be looking forward the next lesson. Unlike most texts, Las puertas retorcidas doesn't deal with grammar and vocabulary issues in neat chapters based on topic. Instead, Las puertas retorcidas at its heart is a story, and a mighty good story at that. The story is of two children, a boy and a girl, trapped in a mysterious, scary house. In order to get out, they need to demonstrate knowledge of Spanish, and the reader is required to demonstrate that same knowledge. This book, by the way, was originally written in a French edition as Les portues tordues by Kathie Dior, an Indiana University graduate and former medical doctor educated at the Université de Paris, then translated to Spanish.
The Spanish lessons are incorporated well into the story. Each chapter (there are 46) of the story takes only a page or two (the chapters are a few sentences in the beginning, much longer by the end), and the accompanying lessons are written in a whimsical yet serious fashion that should be appealing to teenagers and adults alike. Although the book presupposes no knowledge of Spanish, it is probably best suited to intermediate students and first-year students who have developed some comfort with using a foreign language. Grammatical topics covered include conjugation of regular and irregular verbs, the present and preterite tenses, gender, subject and object pronouns, and negation. The vocabulary used is the vocabulary needed to tell the story plus some collections of words such as those for numbers, colors and body parts.
One attractive feature of the book's style is that it doesn't "dumb down" its story line in order to make it more palatable for its audience.
The book is accompanied by an audio CD that features the entire text of the Spanish story read by a native speaker. It is spoken slowly enough that students will be able to distinguish one word from the next.
Although this book is made for students learning Spanish, with supplementary material by a teacher it would also work well for teaching English as a second language to Spanish speakers.
Although this book stands well on its own due to its wealth of information and a large glossary for vocabulary, some students might prefer to supplement this book with a good systematic reference guide or a text that lists all the grammatical rules and conjugations in one place. But there is little doubt this is the book students will want to go to first.
