Marcia Mickelson

A beautifully written YA book about a teen immigrant, taking place during 2018 & the height of the asylum-seekers at the Mexican border and how her life takes a turn when she is thrown into the spotlight of the fight for immigrant rights. The author focuses on Millie’s internal conflict of staying with her family and continuing to help her mother or leaving for college 1500 miles & also starting a relationship with the son of an up and coming candidate for senator.

It’s been six months since Sarah’s mother died (how?). The loss continues to weigh heavily on the family but especially on Sarah’s father who is unable to care properly for Sarah and her younger brother or for himself. He stays in his room, is unkempt, and drinks. Sarah takes on the burden and responsibility of caring for Steven, running the household, and keeping Dad out of harm’s way while also trying to encourage him to get help. Sarah’s need to keep the family together no show more matter the cost to her well-being negatively impacts her burgeoning relationship with David. Strong on exploring the themes of grief, how it can impact a family in different ways and beyond the home. Grieving can blind you to reality: Dad unable to do anything, Sarah insistent on taking care of everything herself with little help. show less

When Maya Mitchell graduates from high school, her wealthy father cuts her off and kicks her out because he wants all of his children to be independent adults without any handouts from him. With her older siblings living in different states and her mother living back in her home country of Guatemala, Maya is left to fend for herself and moves in with a work friend for the summer while she waits to go to Columbia for college in the fall. Supporting herself with a library job and weekly show more reviews for her sister's online magazine, she starts going to a writer's room - an apartment in the city where creatives can pay a fee to have a quiet place to work in the city. Through that she starts a budding romance with her neighbor and fellow creative Jake. When she finds out that her father is helping to fund the gubernatorial campaign of a vile racist, she knows she can't stay quiet about he father's beliefs anymore, and she has to learn to use the voice she's cultivated in the writer's room to make a difference.

This book starts out pretty slowly. From the description of the novel, I assumed that her father's involvement with this campaign and what Maya did about it was going to be the main focus of the novel, but we don't find out that her dad even knows this man until a little over halfway through the book. She doesn't actually start doing anything about what she knows until there's only a third of the book left, and she was mostly a bystander to things that other people were doing. Other than getting the investigative reporter involved in the first place and attending a protest, she didn't really do much.

The story also ends really abruptly, and there's no real resolution to anything that happened in the preceding story.

Especially in our current political climate, this is a story that should be told, but it reads like it needed to go through another round of edits to get that story across in the best way possible. I enjoyed reading it for the most part, but I was left somewhat unsatisfied in the end because I feel like the description didn't really fit what I got from this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. All opinions are my own. show less

4 STARS

This is the first book that I have read from Marcia Mickelson. I liked it. Though I was surprised where the story ended up going. I have to admit to shedding some tears while reading the book. It is a clean read. I really like Ellie and Gabe. They were both likeable, smart, with their own strengths and flaws. Some of the other characters were not so likeable or at least the things they did.

Ellie is in her junior year at school. She is sitting by herself at lunch because her best show more friend Sarah was mad at the thing that Ellie did. It was all Ellie's fault. She had the nerve to take information Sarah told her about her possible boyfriend committing a crime and report it to the police. So a lot of the teens were shunning her.

Gabe comes up to Ellie at lunch and tell her thank you for helping him. Gabe is shy and different. The rumors around him that he cuts himself, that he lives in a haunted house by himself. Ellie had not really known much about him before, Now all of a sudden he is sitting by her and talking to her.

Ellie's friend Sarah has always told her what to wear and talking her into buying the expensive brand name stuff. So they would fit in. Now Ellie is not ready to fall back into that place. Ellie's mom was murder this past year her killer was never found. Now its just her and her dad. Ellie is good in school except for history she has a hard time understanding the different civilizations like Inca, and Mayan. She has to do a oral report on the Inca and it was worth a quarter of her grade.

Gabe is a loner. He is part of the track team and good. That is why on prank night the seniors broke into his house took their couch outside and set it on fire. Gabe works at a grocery store. No one ever sees his mom or talks to her. His father's family came from Peru and was part Inca. He is willing to share about the Inca to Ellie. He can communicate with the dead. He wants to share with Ellie but scares her.

I was enjoying the relationships with all the different characters and how they were changing as their experiences, wants take them to different places in their lives.
Their is lots of drama, some of it is typical and some is not. It shows a little about the Inca. Talks about depression and how some cope with it. How some grieve and how different it is for different people.

I had a hard time putting the book down till I had finished it. I would like to read other books by Marcia in the future.
I was given this ebook to read and asked to give honest review of it when I was done by Netgalley.
publication: May 14th 2013 by Cedar Fort, Inc. Sweetwater 256 pages ISBN:9781462111909

Description below is taken off of Goodreads.

Seventeen-year-old Ellie Cummings just wants to be a regular teenager, but after her mother’s mysterious murder, she isn’t sure if she’ll ever be normal again. Her mother’s death has left Ellie and her father worlds apart. And when her best friend abandons her, Ellie has no one else to turn to—except for the strange boy who says he can help.

Gabe de la Cruz seems to know way too much about everything,
and her instincts tell Ellie to stay far away. But when he claims that he can communicate with the dead through an ancient Incan artifact, Ellie can’t resist the temptation of seeing her mother again. In the hanan pacha—the Incan afterworld—Ellie’s mother sends a message to help Ellie understand what happened the night of the murder—a message that may be better kept a secret . . . show less