What Can’t Wait by Ashley Hope Pérez
By Elle
Publication Information: Carolrhoda LAB / 01 Mar 2011 / 234 pages
Format: Uncorrected eARC from Carolrhoda LAB (Carolrhoda LAB is am imprint of Lerner Publishing Group)
Genre: Contemporary Young Adult
Where I heard about it: I had no idea this book existed until I received it for review but you can bet your breeches I am off to buy the shiny and infinitely pretty hardback! And then some for my friends. And my friends’ friends. And their kids. (I already made Kate buy it. Herself.)
Spoilers: Nothing that you won’t get off the book jacket or Amazon.
Review:
“Another day finished, gracias a Dios.” Seventeen-year-old Marisa’s mother has been saying this for as long as Marisa can remember. Her parents came to Houston from Mexico. They work hard, and they expect Marisa to help her familia. An ordinary life–marrying a neighborhood guy, working, having babies–ought to be good enough for her. Marisa hears something else from her calc teacher. She should study harder, ace the AP test, and get into engineering school in Austin. Some days, it all seems possible. On others, she’s not even sure what she wants. When her life at home becomes unbearable, Marisa seeks comfort elsewhere–and suddenly neither her best friend nor boyfriend can get through to her. Caught between the expectations of two different worlds, Marisa isn’t sure what she wants–other than a life where she doesn’t end each day thanking God it’s over. But some things just can’t wait…
I feel like the blurb on this book is a little misleading. Sure, it tells you roughly what happens and it even manages to hit you over the head with the Cinderella-esque hook but… It doesn’t tell you the truth. And the simple truth is: there are no suddenly-ies in Ms Pérez’s novel. There are no shock cliff-hangers, no red-herrings, no ham-fisted, poorly juggled plot devices. There are no real villains and there are no real heroes. In short, What Can’t Wait is chock full of nothing but straight-up, no-nonsense, stunning story telling and its lack of conceit is possibly the most magical thing about the entire narrative.
I fell in love with Marisa, our narrator, in the first ten pages. Any author who can do that in ten pages deserves a little shiny row of gold chocolate stars to consume at their leisure. There was no period of waffling or trying to feel her out – I was there with her and invested in her story before the end of the scene. Marisa is undoubtedly a girl from the barrio and she has the sass to match it but while she is at once fiercely determined and made of candy-flavoured awesome, she is also in turns shy, frightened of the intense faith people have in her and painfully embarrassed about her very noticeable birthmark. As a reader, I found that I was as aware of the presence of the inevitable in Marisa’s life as she was and there were a handful of moments even very early on that I felt so deeply in my chest that I had to fight the urge to read through my fingers.
The snoring lump on the couch is my sister Cecilia, and the niña curled up on the couch cushions by the wall is my five-year-old niece, Anita. They show up like this whenever Cecilia has a throw-down fight with her husband, Jose. He’s definitely the bigger jerk but I don’t approve of all the screaming and door-slamming that she does in front of Anita. Or of how Cecilia drags her out of their apartment in the middle of the night, trash-talking Jose the whole time.
Cecilia is the last person I want to deal with right now, so there are some simple rules I should follow. Don’t close the bathroom door because it squeaks too loud. Wait until Cecilia is in the middle of a good long snore before slipping past. Avoid saying anything that sounds even remotely like “Jose” (that always stirs up the demon in her). And definitely do not stand around watching Anita sleep when I should be walking to school.
But I can’t seem to help myself. Anita is the best thing Cecilia ever did.
Marisa makes a lot of sacrifices throughout the novel: she works for her family and misses classes that she desperately needs to fuel her dreams, she babysits for Cecilia and she loses much of the teenage life she should be out experiencing and, above all, she caters to her father’s unreasonable demands and despot-like iron rule without a single murmur of protest. Despite all of this, I never once felt like Marisa was feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she manages to juggle all of these responsibilities with finding and falling for Alan Peralta, who is a good boy, good son and good baseball player… but also a bit of a flaky artist, never to be spotted without his Sharpies and more in love with Krispy Kreme donuts than any young athlete should be. (But more on that later!)
The thing that I loved most about Marisa was her heart-stopping honest. She’s good at calculus… but no one cares whether she excels at functions and formula or not. She wants to be an engineer… but she has absolutely no idea what being an engineer involves. She wants to make her teacher proud proud… but she can’t handle the intensity of her support and drive to make her be the very best version of herself that she can be.
In the kitchen, my report card is in the same place I left it yesterday, untouched. I’ve been doing this since middle school, hoping that one day my parents will say something. If I stick the grades right in my Mom’s face, she says, “Qué bueno,” but I don’t think the A’s even register to her. I grab the report card and toss it in the drawer with all the others they’ve ignored. Then I get to work.
I will admit to a small bias on my part towards books which portray genuine Hispanic and Latino Americans in realistic communities, dealing with the matter-of-fact challenges which make up such a big part of their culture. Kate rightfully pointed out not that long ago that while this sub-genre of YA is growing –it is not as painfully under-represented as it once was – it is still difficult to illustrate Hispanic and Latino teenagers’ experiences accurately without hitting people over the head with all of the issues inherent in their lives and turning them into tired tropes, rather than exposing them for the cancerous problems which they actually are. Poverty, drugs, gangs, teenage pregnancies and a generation which believes that there is nothing out there for them are all frequent flyers in the genre but, while What Can’t Wait features every single one of these issues at one point or another, it does it in such a subtle, carefully crafted way that I didn’t once feel like I was being told everything and shown absolutely nothing, or that I was being hit over the head with How! Bad! It! All! Is! Instead, the issues are dealt with as they should be: part of the every day environment that Marisa encounters. Part of the characters’ lives. Just another day. In this way, the issues were even more heartbreakingly appalling thanks to unbelievably normal everyone thinks they are.
“So what’s his story? Where’s he live?”
“Used to live with his dad downtown, but he got fed up with Lamar. It’s all preppy like people say it is, you know, all academic and shit. Too stressful. So he moved in with his mom. She has one of those nice apartments on Meadowbrook.”
“You already saw his apartment?”
“Oh yeah,” she says. She carries her burger over to the bed, closes her eyes and stretches. Her face says GUILTY x40.
I wad up one of the shirts from the floor and throw it at her. “You’re so bad, girl,” I say, because that’s what I always say. But I don’t worry too much, because I dragged her sexy self to Planned Parenthood sophomore year.
Brenda stares at her fingernails, and picks her cuticles a little, no doubt reliving some delicious moment with Greg. “Maybe, but being bad feels so good. You know what I mean.”
The thing is, I don’t.
The best thing about the entire novel was that every single character – even the side-characters – got some form of development. One by one, through Marisa’s eyes, these characters grew and learned and saw each other in many different lights. And every single one of those characters? Was flawed. Even the very best of them (such as Marisa’s beloved Alan, or the ever-loyal Greg) had their gnarly bits, ugly bits and the bits that you didn’t necessarily want to see but they were inevitably things that Marisa didn’t shy away from – because she couldn’t. Being unable to kid herself is one of her Marisa-isms, along with a whole host of other things, like feeling indebted to Anita, reaching her limit, and going through her own narrative like a boomerang.
I loved Marisa. I love this world.
Do you hear that, Ms Perez? I want more.
