I am not your perfect mexican daughter

Though Julia is saddened by her sister’s death, she’s put off by her mother’s crazed emotional display, and by the attention-seeking grieving she sees her nosy aunts engaging in. Amá was supposed to pick Olga up from her job at a medical office on the day of the accident, but when the hotheaded Julia got in trouble at school, Amá was forced to get Julia instead, and so Olga was left to take the bus home. Olga, who was always the prim and proper “perfect Mexican daughter” and Amá and Apá’s favorite, was recently run over by a semi on the streets of Chicago while crossing the road to transfer buses. The novel opens as fifteen-year-old Julia Reyes and her parents, whom she calls Amá and Apá, are looking into the casket of Julia’s recently-deceased older sister, Olga.