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

Ingman, and the failure of her first relationship with a wealthy white boy named Connor, attempts suicide and fails, alerting her parents to just how difficult things are for the sensitive and intense Julia. Julia, depressed due to inescapable and abject poverty, intense pressure to fill Olga’s shoes, the fear that she won’t get into college, even with the help of her kind English teacher Mr. As she learns more and more about her sister, and eventually discovers that Olga was pregnant at the time of her death with a married man’s child, Julia is forced to reconsider the role secrets and lies have played in her family-and is pushed to the brink of sanity by the burden of keeping her sister’s final secret. Determined to dig up some dirt on Olga, Julia begins going through her sister’s possessions-and discovers that Olga was not who her family thought she was. Julia resents her parents’ poverty, her mother’s restrictive rules, her working-class neighborhood’s shabbiness and monotony-and in many ways, her sister Olga, for dying and leaving Julia alone, forever in the shadow of Olga’s perfection. A year ahead in school and in possession of wit and smarts beyond her years, Julia’s acute intelligence and love of the world of books marks her as different from the rest of her large, loud, working-class immigrant family-and her black-sheep status, exacerbated by the untimely death of her “perfect” older sister Olga, pushes her further and further into fantasies of moving away and living in New York as a famous writer. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out.Julia Reyes is the fiery, ravenous, ambitious, contrarian narrator and protagonist of the novel. But it's not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation.

'- The New York Times Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. 'Alive and crackling-a gritty tale wrapped in a page-turner. #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A 'stunning' (America Ferrera) YA novel about a teenager coming to terms with losing her sister and finding herself amid the pressures, expectations, and stereotypes of growing up in a Mexican American home.

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