I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez

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I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez



                Olga Reyes is dead at twenty-two, hit by a semi-truck while crossing the street. Now her little sister Julia, the ungrateful, difficult daughter is left to deal with the family’s loss. Julia and her mother never had a great relationship. Where Olga was content being a grown woman still living with her parents, Julia wanted to leave and go to school in New York. Olga would spend hours helping their mother clean or cook, while Julia still can’t fry tortillas and hates manual labor. She is everything her sister wasn’t and her mother reminds her of that every chance she gets. Julia knows she isn’t perfect, that she talks back and gets in trouble, that sometimes she hates school and just wants to get away. It isn’t until she finds some risky lingerie and a hidden love note of Olga’s that she realizes that maybe her sister wasn’t perfect either.
                This book made me feel like a teenager again and I mean that in the best and worst ways possible. I remember the possibilities that lay ahead and how excited I was to go to college. But I also remember the anxiety that came from being a teenager and trying to find yourself and your center. That’s what makes this book so powerful. Sánchez captures beautifully the experience of being a teenager. Julia was an extremely well developed, well thought out and extremely complicated character. Not only was Julia living with loss of her sister, which was a huge upheaval in her family, but she was also the daughter of undocumented immigrants, a young Mexican living in a poor neighborhood in Chicago.
Sánchez deals with a lot of complex issues in this novel and she maintains an amazing level of depth in her characters. She did an amazing job creating this layered story about being a teenager, being poor, wanting more, being disappointing and finding yourself. You aren’t going to please everyone in life, Julia accepted that in order to be herself. More than anything this narrative was well crafted and believable, filled with all of the complexities we would expect out of life. I enjoyed this novel. I definitely recommend this book because I feel like it has a lot to say about growing up and establishing who we are and who we want to be regardless of the expectation. I give this novel 4 out of 5 stars.

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