I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter in Around the Year in 52 Books

Oct 02, 2020 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was amazing

Shelves: stayed-up-way-too-late, fiction, young-adult, coming-of-age

I thought this book was brilliant. It's rare to find a book that is so real and so complex and so heart-wrenching and so pitch-perfect. Not once did this feel sappy or twee or full of excessive melodrama.

I will admit, at first I hated this book. Julia is not a likeable person. It was hard to spend time with her. But the dialogue felt crisp and Julia felt like a real person - I was having a real reaction to her! - so I decided to stay with it for a bit. By page 30, I was thinking maybe this will I thought this book was brilliant. It's rare to find a book that is so real and so complex and so heart-wrenching and so pitch-perfect. Not once did this feel sappy or twee or full of excessive melodrama.

I will admit, at first I hated this book. Julia is not a likeable person. It was hard to spend time with her. But the dialogue felt crisp and Julia felt like a real person - I was having a real reaction to her! - so I decided to stay with it for a bit. By page 30, I was thinking maybe this will be okay. By page 50, I was sure I was hooked. So, if you find yourself considering a DNF, try to commit to 50 pages first.

Julia felt like a real teenager, and her conflicts with her mother felt incredibly real. The relationship between Julia and her parents is at the heart of this book. We see Julia try to be a loving daughter while being her own person, at the same time that she's lashing out in frustration. We see her exhausted parents trying to hold Julia tighter and tighter to keep her safe from the dangers of the world. I felt Julia's anger and I felt Julia's love and I felt Apa & Ama's worry and fear. I also enjoyed Julia's friendship with Lorena, and their new friendship with "Juanga" as well. I liked seeing teens do teen things without it becoming a big Afterschool Special Event. The dialogue & conversations sounded very real to me, the parent of teens, and that's something that many authors fall flat on.

There is some window-dressing that feels like a few too many vegetables in the soup (did we really need (view spoiler) no we did not), but this looks like a debut novel, and I'm sure Sanchez will hone her craft in future books. I cannot wait to read what she writes next!

CW for suicidal ideation and gun violence.

Props to Google. When I just now searched to make sure "ideation" is the right word, I got a full page of Prevention Hotline info. ...more

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Aug 29, 2021 Andrea rated it it was amazing

Wow. This book was intense. Intensely emotional, intensely intimate, and a perfect portrayal of the intense experience of youth, depression, and the struggles of being bicultural.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that conveyed an adolescent’s voice and perspective this perfectly. Though the protagonist and I couldn’t be more different, the author’s spot-on rendition of teenage angst pulled me back to my own teens and early twenties; a time when everything in life was so piercingly all-consumi Wow. This book was intense. Intensely emotional, intensely intimate, and a perfect portrayal of the intense experience of youth, depression, and the struggles of being bicultural.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that conveyed an adolescent’s voice and perspective this perfectly. Though the protagonist and I couldn’t be more different, the author’s spot-on rendition of teenage angst pulled me back to my own teens and early twenties; a time when everything in life was so piercingly all-consuming, when I experienced everything anew through the eyes of an almost-adult.

The main character of this book is a whip-smart, low-income, first-generation Mexican American girl with undocumented parents and aspirations beyond a life of grinding manual labor and childbearing. Julia’s narrative begins after the death of her older sister Olga, the “perfect Mexican daughter” — virginal, domestic, passive, family-oriented — something Julia isn’t and doesn’t want to be. As Julia explores the circumstances surrounding her sister’s death, she uncovers layers of family secrets, and slowly falls deeper and deeper into depression.

The book impressively depicts Julia’s slow descent into severe depression as well as the aftermath. Julia is an incredibly relatable protagonist — prickly, sarcastic, and sensitive — and is not always likeable, a realistic portrayal that I deeply appreciate, especially in a female character in a YA novel.

I also appreciated that she is low-income — her mother cleans houses and her father works in a factory — because I find that honest, authentic portrayals of low-income people are few and far between in many books I read. Her family’s poverty is pervasive throughout the book in a very realistic way: there isn’t always food in the refrigerator; she and her mother shop at thrift stores; and she rarely has money for “fun” things. It’s not the main focus of the story, but it influences everything she and her family do because that’s how life is when you’re poor. The skilled representation of how grinding poverty can be made me realize the lack of “income diversity” in the books I read. Going forward, I will make it a priority to seek out books written from the perspective of low-income people.

All in all, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is a National Book Award finalist, and it’s easy to see why. I applaud Erika Sánchez’s storytelling and characters and can’t wait to read more from her. ...more

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May 06, 2021 Laurel Kristick rated it really liked it

Shelves: ya-new-adult, aty-2021

Read this for my book club. Really enjoyed the complexity of the characters and the voice of the protagonist.

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Feb 21, 2018 Celeste rated it it was ok

I had high hopes for this book, but I didn't like the main character. She was hard to get behind and the amount of language and crass content were a major turn off. I enjoyed the second half of the book more than the first half, but overall it wasn't what I was expecting. ...more

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Nov 24, 2020 Ana rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: young-adult, 2020, 2020-aty, 2020-november

This was grittier than I expected, probably because it had been a while since I saw the summary. But parts of this reached inside and yanked at your heart. I wouldn't say that I really liked the characters, but it was an interesting book. ...more

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