My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Life is not always easy on a person’s dreams, especially on a young woman’s dreams in a country where gender equality is not highly valued. In this excellent YA novel, Ms. Méndez perfectly balances drama and romance to tell the tale of a young woman in Argentina pursuing her impossible dream: to become a professional fútbol player.
Camila is a Palestinian-Argentine teen who has been forbidden from playing fútbol (soccer for American audiences) by her mother and abusive father. But unbeknownst to them, Camila is the star fútbol player on her teen girl’s team known as Furia who has a real shot at going pro. But things start to get complicated as her older brother’s pro fútbol career continues to thrive and Diego, a local boy who has made a reputation as El Títan in the Italian fútbol league and who has had a crush on Camila since they were kids, comes back home. As all of these things collide, Camila has to make a choice between her love and her dream.
The first couple of chapters made me a bit concerned. With all of these multiple narrative threads, it was difficult to figure out where exactly this book was going in the beginning. I also feared that this book would tip over too much into typical YA romance territory with lots of melodrama. Fortunately, like her main character, Ms. Méndez knows the story that she wants to tell and begins to thread these multiple plots together brilliantly. This is not a sappy YA romance, nor does the ending feel like it magically happened. There are real consequences to Camila’s choices and some of them nearly put her dreams out of reach.
Because there are multiple plot points throughout this novel, some don’t get as much play as I feel they should have. In particular, Ms. Méndez is able to weave a bit of Argentine politics into this novel. Argentina’s battle over women’s rights in general and abortion in particular is prevalent in the background of this book and even has a bit of a moment to shine towards the end. But Ms. Méndez doesn’t go more than skin deep in examining these issues in this novel. Admittedly, weaving in these kind of gender politics might have dragged the main narrative down, but I personally would not have minded if she had explored it more deeply, in the same way that Angie Thomas explored race issues in The Hate U Give.
Overall, this is a great tale of female empowerment and choosing which dreams to follow. While it takes a few chapters for things to coalesce, when it does this novel is great. Whether you are in to YA novels or not, I highly recommend this book to you.
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