![]() ![]() Julia, depressed due to inescapable and abject poverty, intense pressure to fill Olga’s shoes, the fear that she won’t get into college, even with the help of her kind English teacher Mr. As she learns more and more about her sister, and eventually discovers that Olga was pregnant at the time of her death with a married man’s child, Julia is forced to reconsider the role secrets and lies have played in her family-and is pushed to the brink of sanity by the burden of keeping her sister’s final secret. Determined to dig up some dirt on Olga, Julia begins going through her sister’s possessions-and discovers that Olga was not who her family thought she was. Julia resents her parents’ poverty, her mother’s restrictive rules, her working-class neighborhood’s shabbiness and monotony-and in many ways, her sister Olga, for dying and leaving Julia alone, forever in the shadow of Olga’s perfection. A year ahead in school and in possession of wit and smarts beyond her years, Julia’s acute intelligence and love of the world of books marks her as different from the rest of her large, loud, working-class immigrant family-and her black-sheep status, exacerbated by the untimely death of her “perfect” older sister Olga, pushes her further and further into fantasies of moving away and living in New York as a famous writer. Julia Reyes is the fiery, ravenous, ambitious, contrarian narrator and protagonist of the novel. ![]()
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