Assessment:
Plot/Idea: Pisano's reflection of a life-disrupting situation will stick with readers. While she blamed her mother for taking her away from the life she loved in Chile, she realizes as an adult that her mother also struggled with the decision. Pisano proves that writing and time are therapeutic.
Prose: Pisano’s clear prose will allow readers to understand the extreme differences between the two worlds in which she lived. Her words and descriptions perfectly depict the distress she experienced—and in some ways, continues to struggle with—at feeling as if she did not fully belong in either world.
Originality: Moving from one country to another is never easy, and the author's reflections on the journey and willingness to write honestly about it are courageous—and will hopefully help others understand what it is like for anyone who has been transplanted into a new culture.
Character/Execution: Pisano's sketches of the dramatic Chilean landscape mirror the turbulence she feels inside upon arriving in California. Allowing readers to experience her unrest is well-executed.
Date Submitted: January 31, 2023
A deliciously intimate memoir centered on illuminating the friction between two disparate worlds, Pisano’s debut opens with a delicately rendered portrait of her parents—her resolute, education-minded American mother and her charismatic Chilean father, a botany student who takes her mother back to Chile as soon as they are married. Pisano poignantly recalls her home country of Chile in conflicting terms—“beauty in such a serene and tumultuous landscape”—that in some ways mirror her mother’s inner turmoil upon her own arrival in an unfamiliar country, and those conflicting feelings are crystallized when Pisano (and her mother) return to California several years later, fracturing Pisano’s once singular world in two.Pisano transforms the routine into memorable portrayals of daily life on the agricultural farm owned by her paternal grandparents in central Chile, and later, in the Californian suburb of Sacramento, where she lives with her grandmother on her mother’s side, a “lively, active [woman] with a no-nonsense attitude.” The contrast builds slowly and steadily but avoids the dramatic, leaving readers with fleeting impressions and ripples of unrest—“I was now the other, from a faraway, little-known, foreign, underdeveloped country”—and a subtle way of conveying both the rupture between Chile and the US as well as that between childhood and adolescence.
The crux of this memoir is Pisano’s silent and often strained relationship with her mother. Somewhere during the journey, Pisano starts blaming her mother for the removal from her native Chile, where she “belonged to a community and a large extended family,” and exposing her to an unknown environment where she desperately tries to blend in while feeling shame at what makes her so different. As their relationship transforms, Pisano works to assert her own identity, but always returns to the sentiment that “belonging feels foreign to me.” Backmatter includes family photographs for added intimacy.
Takeaway: A rewarding mother-daughter memoir about a girl’s search for belonging.
Great for fans of: Funny In Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas, In The Country We Love by Michelle Burford and Diane Guerrero.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
