Historically Inaccurate | Blog Tour

Synopsis

It only takes one moment to change your life forever…

After her mother’s deportation last year, all Soledad “Sol” Gutierrez wants is for her life to go back to normal. Everything’s changed―new apartment, new school, new family dynamic―and Sol desperately wants to fit in. When she joins her community college’s history club, it comes with an odd initiation process: break into Westray’s oldest house and steal . . . a fork?

There’s just one problem: while the owners of the house aren’t home, their grandson Ethan is, and when he catches Sol with her hand in the kitchen drawer, she barely escapes with the fork intact. This one chance encounter irrevocably alters her life, and Sol soon learns that sometimes fitting in isn’t as important as being yourself―even if that’s the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.

Excerpt

We carry on chatting back and forth in Spanish, and I wish I could tell her that she won’t need to buy a car in Mexico because I’ll get her papers, but I can’t do anything until I’m twenty-one. Dad and I have met with a couple of lawyers to see if anyone could take our case pro bono, but they’ve said there’s not much we can do until I am of legal age. I won’t turn nineteen until September, so that won’t happen for another three years, and even then it seems like a long, slow battle, considering the grounds for deportation.

But because Mom willingly left the country they gave her a light sentence of ten years.

Light.

Mom, who had lived in the United States since she was six years old, is now thousands of miles away from me. I am still trying to find out how these things work. If Dad had been in the same position, I would have lost them both, and I’m still not sure if I would have been able to deal with a loss like that.

There are people who have it way worse than me. I have heard the stories and seen the news. Mothers and fathers of large families being caught over minor issues and being deported within a week of being turned over to ICE. People who lived in the United States for ten or twenty years, sometimes even more, being deported in a matter of days, to places where they have absolutely no one waiting for them. 

In a strange, bitter way, Mom was lucky that she had extended family left in Monterrey, but it still hurts, and I can’t help feeling  like the universe decided to kick me in the stomach. The physical injuries of the accident have faded, and while I still wake up in the middle of the night gasping at the sound of metal and  glass slamming against my body, the pain of having my mother ripped away from me somehow hurts more. 

I take a sip from my glass of soda. The weather is nice enough to wear a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of yoga pants. My massive amount of hair is wrestled into a weird ponytail that lets the fresh breeze cool my neck. If I close my eyes, I can nearly ignore the static edge to her voice and pretend she’s still here, that tomorrow morning she’ll be up before me, making breakfast for Dad and giving me a look that says I overslept again when I walk out of my room.

But I open my eyes and she’s on a small screen. So far away.

Dad said the woman from the crash had called me and Mom illegals when he arrived at the scene and they were loading me onto a stretcher. He had to see the officers coming from Mom and the paramedics taking me away, all the while a woman was complaining about her being in the right to merge, and how some wetbacks had cut her off. He watched his family being torn apart.

ICE is not very nice, even if you’ve lived here all of your life, even if your daughter is a citizen.

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