Young Adult is not something I routinely read but every now and then one catches my eye, as this one did. The book focuses on Julia Reyes' last two years of high school in Chicago. Julia has all of the teenaged angst you'd expect but her stress is multiplied because her older sister dies at the beginning of the story, her parents are immigrants from Mexico, and her family is poor. While I can see why Julia drove her mother nuts with her behavior, I could definitely sympathize with Julia too. She's smart, she wants to go to college, she wants to be a writer. None of these are things her mother understands, plus her mother has her own worries. This is a vivid story about one young girl trying break outside of herself and make her own way. The blurb hints at a mystery and there is one, but it's only given sporadic attention and is not the focus of the book.
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