Catalina

An undocumented Harvard student faces an uncertain future in the scorching first novel from Villavicencio (The Undocumented Americans, a memoir). Catalina Ituralde, who was born in Ecuador and has lived in the U.S. since she was five, begins her senior year in fall 2010 with cautious hope, because the DREAM Act bill, which would offer her permanent protection from deportation, is expected to finally be taken up by Congress. Flashbacks reveal her painful life story and determination to succeed. When she’s a baby, her parents die in car crash in Cotopaxi and she’s eventually brought to her grandparents in Queens. As a student, she quickly becomes an overachiever, and by high school she’s a published journalist. While working at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, she meets legacy student Nathaniel Wheeler, who’s obsessed with his anthropological research on the Incas but struggles to understand the experience of contemporary Ecuadorians. When the DREAM Act fails in November, Catalina spirals into a mental health crisis (“All my body felt was a sinking tired dread”). Villavicencio expertly illuminates Catalina’s precarity and Nathaniel’s tokenizing of other cultures. The result is a moving coming-of-age novel that doubles as a no-holds-barred cultural critique. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (July)