{"id":22816,"date":"2017-09-05T07:54:15","date_gmt":"2017-09-05T11:54:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=22816"},"modified":"2017-09-05T07:54:15","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T11:54:15","slug":"when-ya-is-done-so-so-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=22816","title":{"rendered":"When YA Is Done So, So Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love YA fiction, but I’m\u00a0curmudgeonly about it. For instance, it’s taken me a long time to come around to tolerating first-person present-tense narratives.\u00a0For\u00a0my taste, they can too easily\u00a0lend themselves to self-conscious, awkward descriptions (“I brush my straight brown hair out of my eyes and shrug my shoulders”), and the challenges of the format can end up making narrators sound interchangeable\u2014a “uni-voice” of precocious, observant, wry teen girls telling their stories. And it makes me sad to feel cranky about them, because they are funny, insightful\u00a0storytellers\u00a0who just can’t seem to escape their first-person present-tense sand traps.
\nBut! Every so often come books so skillful\u00a0the format disappears and I\u00a0get sucked completely into the\u00a0story. Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give<\/em>\u00a0(HarperCollins\/Balzer + Bray) was one of those stunners, and Erika L. S\u00e1nchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter<\/em>\u00a0(Knopf, Oct.) is another.
\n
\nI remember Bruce Coville once talking about J.K. Rowling’s success. I\u00a0think\u00a0Prisoner of Azkaban<\/em>\u00a0had just come out, and\u00a0Mr. Coville\u00a0was\u00a0having a conversation with a group of Vermont College students. Like all professional children’s book writers at the time, he was sort of ruefully in awe of the way her books had\u00a0captured the global imagination. It was a topic of conversation around campus, and we were all trying to figure out\u2014on a craft level\u2014what made these books so wildly appealing.\u00a0I remember Bruce Coville\u2014whose books have been no stranger to wild popularity themselves \u2014 saying,\u00a0“Her cool-things-per-page ratio is phenomenal.”
\nAnd although I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter<\/em>\u00a0shares just about nothing with Harry Potter<\/em>,\u00a0it\u00a0does share\u00a0a richness-on-the-page quality. There’s so much\u00a0packed into each page, so much personality in the descriptions of characters and spaces, that your mind is sparked with constant delights even when the\u00a0story is in a sad spot.
\nThe book doesn’t pull punches, and it doesn’t pretend it’s not going in deep and honest. Here’s the first sentence: “What’s surprised me most about seeing my sister dead is the lingering smirk on her face.” It’s a shocker of a sentence, and does a beautiful job setting up the promise of this book: the narrator is going to\u00a0be fearlessly honest and direct, and we’d best know that’s where we’re going with her.\u00a0Despite the theme of the searing loss of a family member, this novel is just so real, so funny and awful and sad and messy and wonderful\u2014the way life is after the loss of a very close family member. The details may vary from family to family, but the crazy mix of emotions and grief and horrible decisions saved only\u00a0by the grace of laughter, forgiveness, love, and compassion are universal.
\nI started reading almost reluctantly, because let’s face it, there are a lot of dead family members in YA literature, and there’s enough\u00a0loss in real life to make me really, really not want to subject myself to it in fiction. But this book was worth diving into.
\nI loved the writing. The narrator notices all of the things we actually do notice in real life, but most of us don’t take the time to articulate. “T\u00edo’s house always smells like old fruit and wet dog,” or “Lorena’s mom’s eye shadow is heavy, and her eyeliner curls up from the corners of her eyes. She kind of looks like a homely Cleopatra. Most of the time, she wears skintight spandex dresses that make her body resemble a soft-serve ice cream cone.” And, “I don’t even know what to say to that. Something about it makes me feel like all my insides are being vandalized.”
\nAnd not all of her observations are critical:<\/p>\n

I love art almost as much as I love books. It’s hard to explain the way I feel when I see a beautiful painting. It’s a combination of scared, happy, excited, and sad all at once, like a soft light that glows in my chest and stomach for a few seconds. […] I had a similar feeling when I read an Emily Dickinson poem. I was so excited, I threw my book across the room. It was so good that it made me angry.<\/p>\n

I’ve felt that way about unbearably beautiful things, and I’ll bet anyone reading\u00a0a blog dedicated to books\u00a0has, too. I don’t know if you’ll throw I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter<\/em> across the room, but I guarantee it will find a host of ardent readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Erika L. S\u00e1nchez’s new book nails it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}