#immigrant rep

When seventeen-year-old Abigail goes missing, her best friend Emma sets out to discover the truth about what happened. The police initially believe Abi ran away, but Emma doesn’t believe that her friend would leave without her, and when officers find disturbing evidence in the nearby woods, the festering secrets and longstanding resentment of Abigail’s family begins to surface with devastating consequences.

Among those secrets: Abi’​s older brother Noah’s passionate, dangerous love for the handsome Rat, a recently arrived Romanian immigrant who has recently made his home in the trailer park in town; her younger brother Jude’s feeling that he knows information he should tell the police, if only he could put it into words; Abi’​s father’s mercurial, unpredictable rages and her mother’s silence.

Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard

Love story: 💖💖💖💖 (4/5)

Writing: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 (4/5)

Happy ending? Yes

Is it about coming out? Yes

wlw books, contemporary fiction, coming of age, wlwoc protagonist, lesbian rep, bi rep, immigrant rep

Thoughts: I can’t tell you how amazing it is to read a book about a badass gender non-conforming butch lesbian of color who knows who she is and won’t take shit from all the people in her life trying to make her be someone else - her parents, her Catholic school, or her dirtbag teenage guy friends.

Other characters are confused by Pen’s gender non-conformity - “Are you trying to be a boy?” “Are you trans?” - but she knows that she is a girl. She’s just comfortable as a masculine girl: short hair, borrowing her brother’s clothes, hanging with the boys playing video games, and dreaming about getting a girlfriend. She gets a lot of shit from people for it, but she never stops being herself. Pen is also a first generation Portuguese immigrant in Canada, and cultural differences and language barriers make it hard for Pen to explain that she can’t be the pretty, nice girl her parents want her to be.

The book is very character driven and not plot-heavy. If you’re looking for a book about a butch lesbian fighting to be herself in her relationships with family and friends, read this book.

Warnings: Sexual assault/attempted sexual coercion, general straight teenage boy douchebag behavior (homophobia, misogyny, slurs), teenage pregnancy, alcohol and marijuana consumption (*details/spoilers below)

There is a word Mateo Garcia and his younger sister Sophie have been taught to fear for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico has started to fade to the back of their minds. And why wouldn’t it, when their Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they’re hard workers and good neighbors?

When two ICE agents come asking for Pa, the Garcia family realizes that the lives they’ve built are about to come crumbling down. And when Mateo returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken, he’ll have to come to terms with the fact that his family’s worst nightmare has become a reality.