When Julia is worried that saying in her college application that her parents are undocumented, fearing it could lead to them getting deported, her teacher says, “Trust me...we’re in Chicago, not Arizona. That doesn’t really happen here. Not like that. No one is going to read your essay and track your parents down.” (Chapter 13)
I had high hopes for this book. Maybe it was disappointing to me because I expected the Mexican-American narrator to be just a little more...well, likeable. (Yeah, a likeable protagonist is important to me.) The story does portray the life of a daughter of immigrants, and raises many important issues (privilege, the role of religion, sexuality, abortion, freedom vs duty to family). This alone made the book worth reading. I guess I just didn’t really like the way these issues were raised. Julia as a narrator was very one-sided in her depiction of these things. It’s not that I minded her opinion, but that she thought her view was the only sensible, and couldn’t imagine anyone with a brain disagreeing with her. Obviously this is a YA book, and maybe this is just an accurate depiction of the way a teenage narrator thinks? But I would have hoped a book intended for a teenage audience would find a way to inspire appreciation for at least a little bit of nuance!
Similarly, I wanted to appreciate that this book portrays mental illness (depression). But it was very disturbing to me that until late in the story, I could not tell for sure if the character was dealing with depression, or was just being an angsty and self-pitying teenager.
What brought the book up to three stars for me was Julia’s gift for metaphors. I want to read through this and write down all of her “it was like…”s and her “I would rather”s. Here are a few of my favorites:
“It makes me feel like all my insides are being vandalized.”
“Her perfume smells like a dusty flower in summer twilight.”
“I feel like a three-headed alien in my own home.”
“...makes me feel as if something were filling my chest with sarm syrup, as if all my bones were being slowly removed from my body.”
“I would rather poke my eyes out like Oedipus than sit through another episode of that garbage.”
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