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.