Catalina is trying to work out her own life as she leaves her undocumented family behind to enter Harvard. Suffering from bouts of PTSD, she struggles to connect to her new world just as she struggled to make sense of her old one. She infiltrates the subcultures of elite undergrads-internships and college newspapers, parties and secret societies-and observes them like an anthropologist, but then falls in love, or something like love, with a fellow student, an actual anthropology scholar who wants to teach her about the Andean world she was born in but never knew. They are drawn to each other by the strange attraction of exoticized fascination-she, a real live Latin American, becomes a subject of academic interest; he, in turns, draws her fascination as a white legacy admit born into the strange world she now navigates. Catalina is uncertain: should she let herself become what he wants her to be and take up residence in his secure and privileged world? Or should she return to the life she's known, with all its thorny precarity? Who is she anyway?
Sparkling ... Villavicencio’s prose seduces her readers ... This talky, shrewd, irresistible protagonist deepens our understanding of how small slights and epic challenges mold an immigrant’s life.
A singular, owned, undaunted achievement ... She has composed a great lyrical novel that transcends origin. It is neither American nor Latin American nor Pan American. The spotlight on Catalina’s searching heart is of Villavicencio’s own making. It is her original bel canto, in her superlative voice.
Villavicencio has gifted that remarkable voice to her undocumented Ecuadorian narrator as she navigates her senior year at Harvard ... It’s a delightfully audacious and insightful novel, even if at times it can feel a bit too conscious of that audacity and insight ... Toward its conclusion, the novel slows a bit in order to allow its many moving parts to gel, but Cornejo Villavicencio’s decisions never feel formulaic or forced. Catalina is a great novel about the dream of America and the American Dream, which for far too many — including the woman who wrote it — remains deferred and in danger of being lost altogether.
