Imposter Syndrome and other confessions of Alejandra Kim by Patricia Park

 

Publisher: Crown Books For Young Readers
On Sale Date:  February 21 2023
Pages: 304

I reviewed a review copy from the publisher through Netgalley.com

Alejandra Kim is a teen girl who doesn't seem to fit in in any box. She is both Korean and Argentinian, and those two things don't make her fit in with both the Asian and Latinx community. And mostly, she feels like she doesn't fit in in her exclusive and prestigious school Quaker Oats in Manhattan, where the school population is mostly white, whealthy, from Manhattan and not from  Jackson Heights, where she lives in a small rental apartment with her hardworking mom who is a nurse, and who doesn't want to talk about her Papi's recent death on the subway tracks of the 7 train. Alejandra dreams of being accepted at Whyder College in Maine, and she works hard at school to reach that. But it is difficult at a predominantly white school with friends who consider themselves ''woke'', while actually they aren't so woke as they think they are. After a racial micro-aggressive comment of a teacher, Alejandra's best friend Lauren shines the light on this incident in public in school to fight this type of comments about in this case, Alejandra's Asian looks and the teacher's weird remark that ''it won't be difficult for her to get into college''. Her friend is awarded for standing up against racism and being ''woke''. But Alejandra didn't ask for this kind of spotlight, altough she loathed the comment, because she is a scholarship student, she tries to lie low and not make waves. She goes along with the many daily mispronunciations of her name and assumptions about her background. Alejandra just doesn't know how to be herself and where she belongs, or when she will ever figure it out.

With a perfect blend of humour and seriousness, Patricia Park describes Alejandra's life caught in the middle of everything, while feeling like she doesn't belong to any of it. It shines a real and raw light of how the world treats you when you are a girl like Alejandra, who is one of the most amazing and original teen characters that I read about in YA fiction in a long time. Beside everything going on at her preppy high school, the grief of her father who commited suicide because of depression really was raw and real, and altough the sadness that you felt in the relationship with her mother, which was forever changed, and in the apartment where they live in Queens. It was written so real and beautiful that you could just imagine everything, and how difficult it is for Alejandra to live both her life at home and school which seem two different worlds. The feelings of Alejandra are really coming over from the pages to the reader, and this is why I love, love, love this outstanding, brilliant and original book, it truly has a wow! effect and after finishing it, it still was in my head for the next week to think it over. I loved Patricia Park previous book Re, Jane which is also an amazingly outstanding read, but this book even topped it!!! 

Don't miss out on this beauty of a book!!