Book Review: Indivisible by Daniel Aleman

Thank you to Little Brown, Books for Young Readers & Amazon Vine for my advanced review copy.

My thoughts:

This was a very emotional and heartbreaking story. My heart broke for Mateo as he had to grow up rather quickly and become the care giver to his sister Sophie. Even though this is a fictional family, stories like this are happening every day in real life and it’s not easy to read about without becoming sad. People come to this country for a better life and I couldn’t imagine having to leave everyone and everything I know and have to seek asylum in a foreign country and take any job I can get so my kids can have a better future. This question also ask the reader what does it mean to be American? What makes you American? Overall, I did enjoy the story, but at times I felt it was a little repetitive and could have been flushed out better. I loved the supporting characters who stood by Mateo no matter what and that brought a smile to my face. This was a very solid debut by Aleman and I look forward to reading more books by this author.

About the Book:

This timely, moving debut novel follows a teen’s efforts to keep his family together as his parents face deportation.

Mateo Garcia and his younger sister, Sophie, have been taught to fear one word for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico has started to fade. Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they’re hard workers and good neighbors. When Mateo returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken by ICE, he realizes that his family’s worst nightmare has become a reality. With his parents’ fate and his own future hanging in the balance, Mateo must figure out who he is and what he is capable of, even as he’s forced to question what it means to be an American.

Daniel Aleman’s Indivisible is a remarkable story—both powerful in its explorations of immigration in America and deeply intimate in its portrait of a teen boy driven by his fierce, protective love for his parents and his sister.