![]() The second huge secret Julia uncovers is one she learns while visiting Mexico shortly after her suicide attempt-an attempt she made because she became too overwhelmed by the weight of Olga’s secret compounded with all the other struggles in her life. Julia’s conflict over keeping Olga’s secret, combined with the pressures of school, home life, and her faltering first relationship with Connor, leads her toward self-harm-Olga’s secret threatens to buckle Julia’s entire life, and yet she remains committed to maintaining the lie, for reasons she can’t yet understand. There’s a part of Julia that wants to tell her family the truth about Olga-partly to take the constant scrutiny and spotlight off herself and her own mistakes-but something inside of Julia holds her back from telling her parents the truth. As Julia slowly uncovers the truth about the life Olga was living-surely a lonely, strained, and even dangerous one-she feels almost vindicated in learning that her sister wasn’t the “perfect” girl everyone knew her to be. When Julia, desperate to learn more about what Olga was hiding, hacks her way into Olga’s laptop, she discovers that her sister was sleeping with a married man for years-and later learns that Olga was even pregnant with his child at the time of her death. Julia learns due to slips-of-the-tongue from Olga’s best friend Angie and another one of her acquaintances, a school friend named Jazmyn, that Olga had a secret lover. Olga’s secret unfolds slowly as Julia pieces together the strange objects she finds in her sister’s room-a box of sexy lingerie and a key card to a fancy Chicago hotel called The Continental. As Julia digs into Olga’s past for clues, she discovers secrets more confusing and painful than she bargained for-and then, as she continues down the rabbit hole, she winds up encountering secrets about other members of her family that threaten to tear them all apart. She wonders whether Olga could really have been the “perfect Mexican daughter”-and, if she wasn’t, how she was able to hide the truth from so many people. When Julia’s sister Olga dies in a tragic freak accident, Julia is left with many pressing questions about her quiet, saint-like sister’s life. In the end, Sánchez ultimately suggests that some secrets are too painful to share-and that some lies are actually a mercy, meant to protect people from hurtful, devastating truths. As the novel unfolds and Julia digs deeper into the secrets her recently-deceased older sister Olga left behind, she comes face-to-face with more and more unsettling truths about her family’s past. Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter is that of secrets and lies. The most potent theme throughout Erika L.
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