Thank you to TLC Book Tours and Avid Reader Press for the gifted copy.

Iris has tried everything to assimilate. She changed her name from Inez to Iris, is always polite to authorities, and never, ever speaks Spanish outside of home. But when a startup launches "the Band" as an eco-friendly tool to replace driver's licenses and official IDs, Iris finds herself singled out and unable to prove her "Americaness" anymore.

MY NAME is a satire that follows Iris, a woman with serious internalized racism & classism issues, as she navigates her new identity as a single mom, divorced woman, and someone of "unverified origin." Iris moves through her life and looks down on those who are "too lazy to pull themselves up by the bootstraps," nntil her rosy live crumbles.

A cross between DISORIENTATION (Elaine Hsieh Chou) and OUR MISSING HEARTS (Celeste Ng), MY NAME focuses on the Latinx immigrant experience with dark humor and a lot of MAGA lingo. The premise of the book is unique yet relevant, and Skyhorse brilliantly examines racism through various characters throughout the story.

While I enjoy satire, Iris' internal monologues can be a bit much for some readers. She's a deeply flawed and unlikable character that I had a lot of trouble connecting to or rooting for. But my annoyance at Iris may also partly stem from my own struggles of assimilation and internalized fear of being othered.

The last 50 pages of MY NAME move quickly, and I think the meaning of the ending is quite lost on me