Catalina
Sparkling ... Villavicencio’s prose seduces her readers ... This talky, shrewd, irresistible protagonist deepens our understanding of how small slights and epic challenges mold an immigrant’s life.
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A singular, owned, undaunted achievement ... She has composed a great lyrical novel that transcends origin. It is neither American nor Latin American nor Pan American. The spotlight on Catalina’s searching heart is of Villavicencio’s own making. It is her original bel canto, in her superlative voice.
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Villavicencio has gifted that remarkable voice to her undocumented Ecuadorian narrator as she navigates her senior year at Harvard ... It’s a delightfully audacious and insightful novel, even if at times it can feel a bit too conscious of that audacity and insight ... Toward its conclusion, the novel slows a bit in order to allow its many moving parts to gel, but Cornejo Villavicencio’s decisions never feel formulaic or forced. Catalina is a great novel about the dream of America and the American Dream, which for far too many — including the woman who wrote it — remains deferred and in danger of being lost altogether.
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