The author's experience of being undocumented is woven into this novel and is is what sets this apart from the many other millennial campus novels. I'd be interested to read her non fiction book on the subject

Catalina is a bold, haunting, and beautifully strange novel that completely pulled me in. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes with such raw intensity and intelligence, it felt like every page was vibrating with emotion. This isn’t a book that sits quietly. It’s alive, messy, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.

The story blurs the lines between reality and hallucination, between the political and the deeply personal, and I was constantly struck by how Villavicencio holds space for both chaos and clarity. Catalina, as a narrator, is fierce and vulnerable all at once. Her voice is cutting and often funny, but also filled with pain and longing. I loved how deeply interior this book felt, it doesn’t perform for the reader, it just is.

There’s something so urgent and necessary in the way this novel talks about mental illness, immigration, identity, and the ways institutions fail people. It doesn’t try to resolve these things neatly, which made it feel all the more honest. The writing is sharp and lyrical, and the surreal elements never feel like a gimmick. They feel like a necessary way to tell a story that refuses to be flattened.

If you’re looking for something fierce, deeply original, and emotionally resonant, Catalina is absolutely worth reading. It’s not always an easy book, but it’s a vital one.

A gorgeous book, written beautifully and really vividly told. Explores some important themes such as immigration, womanhood, societal expectations and family relationships. I think this will resonate with a lot of people in one way or another. Really emotive and powerful. I actually wish it was longer!

Powerful, raw, and unapologetically bold 🌴🔥. Catalina is a fierce, beautifully written story that blends identity, culture, and rebellion. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s voice is sharp and original, tackling complex themes with insight and heart. I loved the fierce protagonist and the lyrical prose. A must-read for fans of bold, literary fiction.

Catalina is a novel about an Ecuadorian student caught between the Harvard lifestyle and her and her grandparents' undocumented status in the USA. Catalina is a witty English major starting her final year at Harvard, where she has a thing with the son of a famous filmmaker and gets invited to be part of a secret society. Back home in New York City are her grandparents who raised her in the US, but the two sides to Catalina's life come together as undocumented immigrants become the focus of political battles.

This is a self-conscious campus novel, unpacking the often trivial concerns of campus novel characters through a messy protagonist who stresses about her thesis but also her and her grandparents' ability to stay in the US. Catalina says that she was born in South America and now lives and studies in North America so how can she not call herself American, and that makes this book feel very "American", as in it explores the complexity of the connection across these countries and in different spaces in the USA. There's a lot of discussion of US literature and thinkers, as you'd expect in a campus novel, and also how Catalina does and doesn't interact with South American history and thought, both through her grandfather and through Harvard. In this way, the book explores knowledge and the different ways people come by it. At the same time, it is an emotional novel, with a spiralling protagonist who rejects help from people when she needs it.

I've seen this book miscategorised as 'dark academia' and that isn't going to do it any favours: it is a modern successor to the American literary campus novel, questioning what gets to be part of a campus novel and who is excluded, but it is certainly not going to fulfil anyone's desire for dark academia. It is witty and sad, not really focused on a particular plot but more on Catalina's character and her experiences across a number of months.

A stream of consciousness from an often unlikeable character that shifts between wit, trauma and coming of age story

Enjoyable writing style and strong theme of migration and both the opportunity and fear it can bring

Also, great cover

As a Hispanic girl myself, I really did find myself in these pages and felt for the Fmc. It was a great campus novel that I can’t wait for all else to read.

Catalina is a complex character whose experiences are unique but also in the glimpses of her witty voice, self-aware observations and weird (and sometimes bad) decisions, we find humanity.
It was the author’s writing and the voice she gave Catalina that made me enjoy this book, rather than the plot.
The themes were also engaging, however how Catalina tells us her story was the best part overall. Her literary references and Catalina’s flaws were great additions too,
Cannot wait to read more by this author.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio convincingly depicts a coming of age story involving the immigrant experience and generational differences. I think readers of Elif Batuman and Marlowe Granados will enjoy this.

I love a messy but smart heroine and Catalina was exactly that, a student at Harvard, but also complicated, unsure about fitting in, procrastinating her thesis... And also undocumented, living with her Ecuadorian grandparents who took her in after her parents died in a car accident. Plot wise, I found it a bit thin, even if obviously Catalina and her family's undocumented status is part of the plot, it only became "useful" (plot wise) quite late. There was a lot of jumping around and apartés and paragraphs about khipus (at the Peabody Museum where Catalina works), and I enjoyed that, as well as the irony of Catalina's ancestral culture being of such academic interest when their descendants remains unwanted and are being threatened with deportation.

A debut novel longlisted for the 2024 US National Book Awards for Fiction some three years after her part memoir/part essay “Undocumented Americans” was shortlisted for the same awards in the Non-Fiction category.

The Ecuadorian-American author was one of the first undocumented migrants to graduate from Havard – and her first part, titular narrator has a similar but not identical background: her Ecuadorian parents died in a car crash when she was very young (a crash she miraculously survived), she lived in Ecuador with her Uncle and Aunt until around five when she moved to the US to be bought up by her undocumented grandparents (her grandfather a construction worker, the two converting from Catholicism to Jehoviah’s Witness when she was around ten although Catalina now an atheist) and is hugely supported by them in her academic studies.

The novel is set in 2010 in her last year at Havard – attractive, popular (with girls, boys and faculty members) and academically successful and with good connections and unpaid internships in literary magazines, the year though has a cliff edge as her lack of documentation (as well as making travel impossible) means she cannot really get a paid job despite offers “Four Years at Havard had been presented to me like a trip to Disney World to a terminally ill child and the end was coming” – and it’s this sense of impending ending (with no clear path forwards but equally with the necessarily for there to be an “after”) which gives the book an interesting and different narrative tension, as she also obsessively follows Obama’s failed attempts to pass the DREAM act.

Catalina volunteers (partly by way of paying back the financial flexibility of Havard given her ineligibility for a loan and her grandparents lack of money) in a museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and works closely with a world expert on khipus (a stringed recording device used by the Incas – whose exact function is still being decoded), something which gives her plenty of room for ruminations of colonialism and appropriation.

Some additional tension enters the novel when her grandfather (her grandparents attitude to post like many others in financial difficulties is simply to not open post) turns out to have missed an immigration hearing and has now been ordered to be deported summarily – having initially broken the third world to address the reader, Catalina decides to ask the famous film maker father of her near-boyfriend for help – and he suggests a video-diary and interview.

The book’s blurb states that Havard is “the most prestigious university in the world” and Catalina calls it “the most famous school” – to which I can only say wrong Cambridge – and actually this (and the American-centric world view it implies) probably gets to the heart of my issue with the novel, culturally- whether its native American land acknowledgement, college practices, literary magazines, pop/film references, Latine culture and cultural appropriation – this is a very American novel, and I think its US National Book Award listing is more appropriate than for a UK prize.

But Catalina is a very interesting and distinctive narrator and this does make for an enjoyable novel – perhaps most impressive is the way that the author engenders a kind of restlessness to the prose which matches the narrator’s dilemma as to her future.