I have some complicated thoughts on this one. I wanted to love it. I love the idea. I love the representation. But I found the teenspeak to be inaccurate and distracting, especially in the most serious moments where Lili would suddenly think of something as "fab" or say "freakin'" to a friend. It's not the "freakin'" 90s or early 00s anymore. Perhaps it's different in the Boston locality, but my students don't talk like this. It should only be a minor issue, but it took me out of the story multiple times and that's exactly the opposite of what a book like this should be doing. I also didn't buy the chemistry between Lili and the white boyfriend she hides from everyone else back in her life in Boston. Say no to instalove, friends.

The major sins for me was that Lili was learning about topics should probably already know, at least in general sense. I get that the reader has to discover these topics and Lili is a way to do that for the reader, but exploring in this way made the issues of the Guatemalan civil war and immigration lack depth. One line about how the US provided guns to the governments slaughtering indigenous citizens wasn't enough to make the topic feel real or get the reader invested. It felt like a throw away line to say, "look how woke this character is" and nothing more. Also, the MAJOR confrontation scene near the end of the book, the one involving the whole school, was outside of the realm of belief. I don't want to spoil it, but I was rolling my eyes. Nearly all the racist incidents Liliana witnessed or faced were so overt and made the problem feel laughable instead of real and painful and damaging to both the victim and the one believing themselves to be supreme. There was no discussion of how racism isn't always overt, and in fact, it rarely is so reduced to nooses and n and w words. Kids are far more sneaky and subtle than that. I also took serious issue when a character was physically abused by a family member and within two pages that character and family member were hugging it up for photos and everything was fantastic again as if the abuse never happened. Just, NO.

I did enjoy the discussion of how the METCO (think about it as urban POC students who win a place at an elite, mostly white, school through a lottery program) students and white students self segregated at Westburg and how no privileged white kids were ever bussed to inner city schools.

This book tries hard and is at times very close to the mark. This is a debut novel, so I look forward to seeing where the author goes from here. I have faith her next novel will avoid some of the pitfalls here.