JUST SAY YES

A Peruvian American teen is shocked to discover she’s undocumented.

It’s 2007, and 17-year-old Brooklynite Jimena Ramos throws a rooftop party the night before she begins senior year. When the cops shut it down, Jimena worries that her law-abiding, telenovela-watching mom will be pissed. What Jimena doesn’t count on is her mother’s revelation: They overstayed their visa and are in the U.S. illegally. Devastated, Jimena embarks on Operation Green Card. She repeatedly asks her Russian American friend and neighbor, aspiring Oxford student Vitaly Petrov, to marry her—and he repeatedly declines. Instead, after offering to help with her mission of finding a suitable marriage candidate, he shows her a PowerPoint full of strategies and functions as her bodyguard while she goes on dates. Jimena joins a dating website, certain she’ll find love and marriage. When that plan fails, she pivots to thinking about marriage as a business transaction and uses Craigslist to attract a potential husband. That, too, is a bust. Jimena then meets a blue-haired white boy activist at a DREAM Act rally, who offers to help her get her citizenship—but it all gets complicated, especially as her feelings for Vitaly begin to evolve. The first-person narrative successfully pulls at the heartstrings as Jimena’s frustrations over her stunted future, her desperate urgency to become naturalized, and her fear of deportation grow with every moment.

Grounded and relevant: a thoughtful exploration of living with uncertainty.