26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Double Standards Illustrate Illegals' Dilemmas, October 2, 2009
This review is from: Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America (Hardcover)
Four Mexican girls, two legal immigrants born in the United States, and two illegals born in Mexico with legal siblings born in the US, grew up as best friends in junior high and high school. Just Like Us reads like a detective novel as Helen Thorpe shows how they cope with these similarities and differences--how they manage to get real or fake IDs, drivers' licenses, jobs, and college financial aid--all the while dealing with deported parents, boyfriends, and peer pressure. Finally, when an illegal immigrant teenager murders a Denver police officer, additional obstacles emerge to thwart their happy friendships as their differences become even more evident. As Thorpe, wife of Denver's mayor, relates, "All of us found ourselves in new territory, far from our point of origin. I didn't know what the rules were anymore."
Through reading this book, I learned to care about how these girls survived the conflicting laws in the US that seemed, for the most part, to prevent them from achieving the American dream. Thorpe relates to their dilemmas, having been an immigrant herself. She documents how their fiercest opponent, Tom Tancredo, himself offspring of immigrant grandparents, tries to gain political capital by blocking illegal immigrants from receiving decent educational programs, health care, and respect. At the same time, the Mexican immigrants--both legal and illegal--must pick fruit and vegetables, clean dirty buildings, and remodel other wealthy citizens' houses in order to survive.
As Thorpe weaves these girls' lives through the events swirling around them, I found myself staying up late to read one more chapter, or two, or three before going to sleep. Thorpe wrapped up this incomplete story with a question as there really is no ending to the dilemma of illegal immigration with its many personalities and complex rules. She asks "Did the idea of a country--an abstract concept, really--truly matter more than the sum happiness of all the individuals living without its boundaries? No, I thought. People mattered more than governments. In fact, this country was founded on that very idea."
by Susan M. Andrus
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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24 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Docudrama Doesn't Translate To Book Format, December 6, 2009
This review is from: Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Helen Thorpe had a good idea: capture the saga of four Latina high schoolers, two of whom are legal citizens and two who are not. The cover with the doe- eyed depressed teen's photo should have warned me that this would have a thudding, "after-school special" quality, and it does. Great concept; good representatives are found in Marisela, Yadira, Clara, and Elissa. However, Thorpe's approach is somewhat helter-skelter: Is it political, personal profile, or third-person characterizations from afar? Unfortunately, it's a little bit of all three, and I felt as though the story is the equivalent of a carriage with its wheels stuck in the mud. Where, or how, are we going? Unlike oral historians such as Studs Terkel, we are not given the sense of each person; each young woman is always filtered through Thorpe's slightly priggish, English schoolmarm eyes. The section where she sat on the periphery during a graduation night party at a Mexican nightclub in Denver would be the prototype for my argument. Too many people, too many stories, too many agendas. The story would have been well told as a documentary with visual storytelling. I'm sorry to say I could never get excited about this book.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting perspectives, January 30, 2010
This review is from: Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
First of all, I was intrigued about and somewhat wary of the whole idea of tying the characters together with the prom. I was afraid that it would read like an extended cliche, but Just Like Us is no cliche: It is absolutely real. The girls who are the subjects of the book lead complicated and difficult lives at times, and citizenship is an ever-looming entity that both unites and divides the girls. I found this to be the most engaging part of the book. Immigration law is by no means clarified, and if anything, this is what the book exposes. Immigration and citizenship are more than simply passage of laws and enforcing policy- This is how such laws and processes affect real people. I agree with another reviewer in that the book has an "after-school special" feel to it, but it does delve deeper than that. I would encourage anyone who has strong opinions about illegal immigration, immigration policy, and amnesty to pick up this book and peek into the lives of real people whose lives are affected on every level by these issues.
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