It appears that we have reached the end of the month of June, which also means the end of YA Fest. For this final Friday of the month, I have chosen The Weight of Everything by Marcia Argueta Mickelson. I was fortunate to be able to hear from and meet Mickelson at this year's San Antonio Book Festival in mid-April. Mickelson is a San Antonio based author of several YA books, including the Pura Belpré Honor Book, Where I Belong.
The Situation: It is the beginning of junior year, and if the first day of school was not stressful enough, things are made slightly worse due to Sarah also starting out at a new high school. Her old school, the Austin Performing and Fine Arts Academy, was a boarding school, and a fraction of the size of San Antonio's Richards High. But this is not the only thing making Sarah nervous. She risks having her phone out during first period Physics just in case her dad needs her. She also takes care of her eight year-old brother Steven, as well as the cooking, the cleaning, and the majority of the bills. Things were not always like this, of course. A year ago, Sarah's life looked completely different. But her mother was also alive then.
The Problem: Though she is only 17, Sarah has become the adult and caretaker of her little family, since her dad has turned to taking solace in alcohol and his favorite history documentaries. The pressure is intense, and Sarah only has time for schoolwork, making sure Steven stays fed, and the small Etsy shop she runs to bring in extra money. The last thing on Sarah's mind is dating, at least that is what she tells herself, no matter how often David Garza insists she let him help and support her. Memories of her mother become a source of comfort and pain, but it is a school art assignment that causes her to explore her Guatemalan roots and tell her mother's story. Sarah finds herself once again wanting to create art, while also realizing she was never meant to carry as much as she has.
Genre, Themes, History: This is a young adult fiction novel set in and around modern-day San Antonio. Sarah is a junior in high school who was forced away from her previous school, mostly due to her father's alcoholism. Without a dependable parental figure in the house, Sarah becomes the adult overnight, and is now the one to make sure her little brother Steven is fed and clothed. While her dad has embraced alcohol as his way of dealing with grief, and Sarah ignores her own needs in order to focus on everyone else's, her little brother has turned to numbers and memories. When she receives an art assignment and looks into her mother's research, she also discovers a moment of Guatemalan history not many are aware of, despite the major part the U.S. played in it, and decides to continue her mother's work.
My Verdict: From the beginning, this story presents a feeling of injustice that everyone is familiar with, for one reason or another. While not every reader will have personal experience with what it is like to live with someone with an addiction, nearly every reader does know those moments when life feels unfair, and things are not as they should be. Sarah's situation is immediately clear, and the author does not have to spell everything out for us to see it. When David enters the picture, Sarah's hesitance to let him in is understandable, but he is insistent, something I found to be unlikeable about his character, even though he is presented as a genuinely good person. And Sarah's rediscovery of her mother's love of Latin American art and her desire to explore Guatemalan history is a wonderful direction for the story to take, allowing readers to learn something while watching Sarah heal.
Favorite Moment: Steven's love of sports stats and figures is a quirk, but a healthy one, and honestly not a bad way to deal with and work through unexplainable grief. His moments of intense focus on whatever sport he is watching, or his baseball cards as he stacks them, are both endearing and engaging, even for non-sports fans.
Favorite Character: Despite the schedule she keeps, Sarah manages to find a new friend in Makaila, a science-minded student at Richards who wears fun STEM-related graphic shirts with slogans like STEM is the New Black written on them.
Recommended Reading: Roxy by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman tells the story of two siblings and their struggle with addiction. It is a creative, but also haunting story.
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