Carmen Rodrigez

This book started off really interesting in my eyes and slowly detiorated into a chore to read. It seems like Rodriguez is trying to be too poetic and fragmented, and the overall effect is not very pleasant to the reader. It felt like I was a part of an inside joke, unable to understand what was going on. I couldn’t tell who was talking when and about what. I guess that's because I should've looked into the background of the events that were talked about, but now it's too late and I have a bad impression of this book. The first chapter about the family coming to Vancouver was really good however; I was surprised to realize that the story was about Canada and not about the States like many of the books we have been reading. It was nice to hear the Burrard Bridge and Stanley Park mentioned. It pained me to read about the reaction of the grandma to the family moving away and forgetting their roots to a certain extent. The girls were ashamed to be Latin, to speak in Spanish, and to eat Chilean dishes. What the grandma doesn’t understand is that although it can be very painful to forget your roots, it’s worse to be in a country and to not fit in at all. It’s not even like the family chose to move away, they were forced to. This changes things dramatically because they don’t have the option to come back like the Garcia girls. When one is forced out of their home, they have to do anything in their power to make their new home feel comfortable. It’s sad that this multinational identity had to cause so many problems and painful moments, but that is just the life of an immigrant, especially that of an exiled one. I can relate to this because both my mom and dad’s siblings, including us, have moved away from South America. It must be devastating to our grandparents to come visit us only once a year if even that, and see that we have grown without them and no longer see our native tongue as our first. We no longer dream in Portuguese or say “ai” when we get hurt. We are interested in watching Friends and Gilmore Girls and not Novellas. We don’t ask them to bring us that obscure little chocolate we used to love: we are content with what we have here. However, they are very supportive of us looking for a better place to live, unlike the grandma in this story.