This fictional novel is also a campus novel and well written. I highly recommend this and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's work of non-fiction, The Undocumented Americans. I would also suggest listening to Villavicencio's podcast interviews.

I enjoyed reading this short novel about the titular Catalina navigating life after high school and discovering herself at college. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is someone I will look out for in the future as I loved the way she wrote the character's motions and comments on life. Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the eARC.

This is the story of Catalina Ituralde. An undocumented young woman who has been accepted at Harvard. Having left her homeland for more opportunities, she has been sent to live with her undocumented grandparents in Queens.

She has kept her secret close and now that she is a senior she feels unsettled. Is there any place for undocumented here? It would seem not.

What awaits her after graduation? Will she find love? Can she be honest with someone?

This is a beautifully written book. There was such a vulnerability in this book.


Netgalley/ RHPG One World/ June 18,2024

Loved The Undocumented Americans and loved this too. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's voice is so sharp and singular. Cannot wait to see what she does next. Girlie could write a space opera sponsored by Pepsi and I'd be first in line to snap that shit up.

"Catalina" is told from the perspective of the eponymous protagonist Catalina Ituralde, an undocumented Hispanic student at Harvard. She's been raised by her parental grandparents after her parents passed away in a car accident, and shares her firsthand account growing up in the US at the turn of the 21st century.

There's so much packed into this deceptively short novel, and references to a number of semi-recent events in time (9/11, Obama's presidential campaign and election, the repeal of the DREAM Act, etc.) made Catalina's story feel far more relevant. She approaches contradictory and nonsensical standards in society in politics with a tongue-in-cheek, dry humor - a way to lessen the blow of on some of the heavier and emotional topics that her story traverses. Personally though, the writing style and storyline progression felt a little too disorganized and chaotic and came off more as a stream of consciousness ramble and there were admittedly points where I grew frustrated with or disagreed with Catalina's perspective or actions.

Publishing July 23, 2024

It’s hard to go into this book and not draw parallels to “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman, but somehow I feel more strongly drawn to Catalina. It’s wild how a book can be both funny and terribly sad. Catalina deals with feelings of ostracism, sadness, perfectionism, and loneliness. We meet her in her senior year at Harvard, and quickly learn that she is undocumented and is at a loss what she will do once she graduates (and hopes that DREAM passes). Sometimes she does things that are off-kilter, but that makes her feel more real and multi-dimensional.

Thank you to the author and publisher for providing an advanced copy through Netgalley.

I don't throw around this phrase lightly, but this was "pure vibes."
It will undoubtedly get compared to The Idiot, even though they are two completely different stories, voices, and ideas. Such a comparison would do this story and the writing justice, though. It is frenetic and scattered in a brilliant a way that I don't think I've seen achieved before.
Circling back to vibes, some of them were insufficient for me, and it was hard to stay motivated to read this thing when I knew it was going to meander at any second. As much as I enjoyed Villavicencio's characterizations (funny and short!) I felt the descriptions of places and events was much less concrete or helpful. Part of the campus novel/bildungsroman's appeal is seeing the world through naive eyes, and this vision seemed incomplete. Catalina is clearly very smart, so why doesn't she have a bit more commentary about things?
On the whole, the vibes were wide-roving and cool. I look forward to reading more of Villavicencio's badass writing!
Huge thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

Unfortunately not really my style, though I thought the themes were (depressingly) gripping. While I liked the character, I couldn't really relate to her as well as I would have liked -- again a style issue.

I am not sure quite what to make about this book. It is about an undocumented young woman who gets accepted to Harvard and the reality of her status hitting her as she begins to approach graduation. BUT it is sort of a too hip first-person narrative that in some ways undermined my connection to the character in a Sloane Crossley kind of way. Intriguing, but not sure I am recommending -- noting shout outs to Jonathan Franzen and Selena Gomex in the afterward!

I felt it was an okay read but I felt I couldn’t connect with characters as much as you wanted to but overall a good book about the topic she was writing about

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for a review.

Captivating from the start, but the writing style is not for me.
I did enjoy a lot of the themes the author explored (grief, perfectionism, love, loneliness...)and there was a lot of times where I connected to the character and what she was experiencing but its easy to get lost in the plot.
It is an interesting read though. The immigrant struggle was very well portrayed though.

This was such an interesting story, and I really enjoyed it! I feel like my biggest complaint is that I wish the book was a little bit longer because I feel like there was so much more story to tell!

A wonderful debut novel. Thanks for the review copy. Very gripping with the vulnerability. This was a breath of fresh air.

4.25 stars. The beginning had me a bit worried, with way too many pop culture references and a romance subplot that started out way too corny but as it went along the story got better and more serious. The constant references to Latin American history and literature made be happy as that's exactly what I've been studying for the past 7 semesters.

I gave this book 4 stars only because I wish it was longer! Karla delves into incredibly relevant / pertinent topics surrounding immigration reform in this novel that follows Catalina - an undocumented college student at Harvard University during the senior year college. I didn't give this 5 stars only because I felt like with more pages, we could've dug even deeper into Catalina's story.

I will continue to read anything that Karla writes, her voice and storytelling are incredible. If you're a fan of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, I highly recommend picking this up too.

Catalina is an Ivy League college student and a writer, but there is one problem that continuously haunts her past, her present, and what could be a bright future: she is undocumented. The narrator takes us through four semesters (four chapters and an epilogue) of her academic and personal life where she shows the reader how every single second of her life is affected by her status. Due to the main topic, this could very well be a sad novel, but it is quite the contrary. It is funny, witty, yes sad, but still joyful and the reader gets a full sense of her complex human condition. Since at any moment Catalina could be deported to a place she long ago forgot, the emotions she goes through make sense: she feels cornered, scared, depressed, amazed, maybe even a little bit crazy, but she does not let this tarnish her dreams.
Her family, professors and she, are well aware that Catalina is smart and can do something to change her reality. At moments though, she self-sabotages, as her friend points out, because she has absolutely no idea if she will be able to survive. This book portrays the whirlwind of emotions that any human being would go through if they were faced with these circumstances. The narrator even includes the reader in her book, by asking a direct question and providing the lines for us to answer a very difficult question. The reader becomes active in the author’s narrative, which is one of the points of her book, to get across to people in her similar situation to tell them to react, to act, and to do something to change their circumstances.
Another interesting characteristic of the narrator's voice is that sometimes she references other literature books, both American and Latin American, but she does not do it for the sake of name-dropping. She speaks in the first person to let the reader meet her up close and by adding literary references, she simply makes sincere connections between her life and what she has read, she is in an academic world after all. I also appreciate her mentioning her musical references, which are varied and very Latin-influenced because this contrasts a bit with her literary knowledge and allows her to play with pop culture and canon literature.
After reading The Undocumented Americans, I was eager to read Cornejo Villavicencios' fiction and I was not let down. This is just as amazing as her non-fiction. I am looking forward to reading it on the printed version. I cannot wait to read the following years of Catalina's graduate school experience.
Thank you so much for the book.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with this eARC!

The writing style of this book is very stream of consciousness; the plot isn't linear but rather the MC reflecting on her current and past self.

Ended up DNF'ing at 37%, it just didn't grip me like I wanted to.
I was extremely drawn to the plot synopsis, but I couldn't stick with it based on how the plot was woven. It reminded me a lot of The Idiot by Elif Batuman which I also couldn't get into, but I know a lot of people LOVE that book.

I think this is a strong debut novel, just not for me.

"We knew this was coming, it happens to every undocumented person in America. It is simply a matter of time. A close family member back home dies. You are unable to leave this country, unable to travel home, to say goodbye, to bury your dead. You can afford a calling card but, try as you might to influence the funeral arrangements, you're not there. You're in one of those nightmares where you scream and scream and nobody can hear you. It was our turn now."

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's fictional debut, Catalina, seems quite based on her own life, that which she so eloquently described in her first book, The Undocumented Americans. In Catalina, we meet the protagonist, who was born in Ecuador but sent to live with her grandparents at a young age. They are an undocumented family who lives in Queens. Karla's grandparents subject her first to the Catholic church and later became members of Jehovah's Witnesses. Catalina remembers nothing of Ecuador, and tries to learn what she can, although this sometimes comes at the cost of men's using their relationship with her to do so. Catalina attends Harvard and spends most of the book waiting for the DREAM act to pass.

One of the themes of this book was the Khipu, knotted chord devices used to record information from prehistoric times in the Andes. I may have missed the symbolism, but I did not find that this added much to the plot. Maybe it was the plot, and I missed it.

I liked this book, but I didn't love it. And I wanted to love it, because I really loved The Undocumented Americans and respect the work that Cornejo Villavicencio has done and how she has used her voice to uplift the undocumented community in the USA.

#Netgalley

Dazzling, sparking, unprecedented, unforgettable; Catalina is everything which its' titular character aspires to be. I didn't want to put this novel down!

Catalina centers around a Harvard senior, an undocumented Latina, a wanna-be tragedy queen hurdling towards graduation and *dun dun DUN* real life. Our heroine just wants to be tragically beautiful so badly, it hurts--but alas, not enough. Through Fall, Winter, and Spring semester we trail our narrator along her journey to become capital-A Art in a community, a country, that wants to keep her nameless. We see her encounter her life's tragedies, but they aren't the kind anyone is willing to perceive as beauty.

Catalina is a modern girl's The Bell Jar in this propulsive coming-of-age.

This book starts as a campus novel but becomes something much more. Cornejo Villavicencio so accurately depicts the thoughts, emotions, feelings of being at a liberal arts college in the mid-aughts - the awkwardness, the invincibility and how we learn about ourselves. What makes this one to read is the amazing stream of consciousness style that is so engaging, making you feel that Catalina ia real person. We learn so much about Catalina in such a short novel, but gain insights into the unique Dreamer perspective that will have you alternating between laughing and crying. The writing jumped around quite a bit which was a little chaotic, but always came back to the theme and I finished in nearly one sitting.