When We Make It
by Elisabet Velasquez (Author)
@ Amazon | Bookshop | IndieBound
Booktalk: Sarai is a first-generation Puerto Rican eighth grader who can see with clarity the truth, pain, and beauty of the world both inside and outside her Bushwick apartment. Together with her older sister Estrella, she navigates the strain of family traumas and the systemic pressures of toxic masculinity and housing insecurity in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Sarai questions the society around her, her Boricua identity, and the life she lives with determination and an open heart, learning to celebrate herself in a way that she has been denied.
Snippet:
BUSHWICK LIBRARY
Mami has started dropping Estrella & me off at the library
every Saturday.
If there wasn’t a time limit on how long you can neglect
your kids before it becomes abandon,
maaaaan, Mami would leave us there ’til Sunday.
The library gives Mami a vacation from us.
For one day she gets to live inside of a world
where she doesn’t have to be someone’s mother.
A miracle even Jesus would be proud of.
& maybe that makes her sound like a bad mom–
but I love Mami for this ’cause for one day
we get to live inside of a book
and be somebody else too.
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