Iveliz Explains It All by Andrea Beatriz Arango
A novel in verse. I know it will be packed full of emotion. This one especially! Iveliz is going through something. At first, not much is revealed. She talks about how much she loves her dad and how well they get along, but then she mentions how he is no longer with her. What happened to her dad? She talks about the medicine she is on, how angry she gets, how she doesn’t like to talk about ‘IT’. What happened to her dad!?!?!?! Her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s, also lives with her and her mom.
I will say this one has a lot of topics that I might have to warn my students about before they read it. Iveliz does talk about self-harming, or possibly even more (she mentions not being here anymore). She also has moments where she doesn’t remember what she did. She has moments of blind rage, and she doesn’t always know if she yelled, cried, or hit someone. She is in therapy, and she has meds to help, but she still needs to put in the work. This book does a good job of explaining (as the title suggests) what she is feeling. There are times when she doesn’t want to tell anyone what she is going through because she doesn’t think they can help her or that they might not understand. But she also realizes that there is no way for someone to help or know unless she starts talking! I think there was even one character that actually said something along the lines of, “How can I know what I don’t know?” So simple but so important!
One thing I liked, but which made it a little difficult for me, was that there were parts in Spanish. Most of them you could decode from context, but I always wanted to know what exactly was being said. I ended up using Google Translate for most of them. Not a big deal, but it slowed me down in my reading. I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I am usually a quick reader (granted, I mostly read middle grade books), but that also means I don’t sit with a book for long. I’m always diving right into the next one. Having to look up these translations forced me to take my time with this book more so than I have with others.
Overall, this was a powerful, emotional book. I hope this book finds the readers who need it.
Four Out of Five Magical Coffee Cups
Literary Coffee 