Gabi, A Girl in Pieces
Gabi is a Mexican-American teenage girl in her senior year of high school in Southern California. She is smart, loves to write (especially poetry), has two best friends, Sebastian and Cindy, and is looking forward to going to college (hopefully Berkeley!) She is also overweight, has a controlling, out-of-touch mom and a dad who is a meth addict and gone half the time. She struggles with navigating the world of boys, dating, and sex, and has a couple of heartbreaks before she meets a great guy named Martin who loves her for who she is. Her friend Cindy gets pregnant and her other friend Sebastian comes out as gay and gets kicked out of his house. Gabi is there for them through it all. She even supports her sworn enemy, Georgina, when she also gets pregnant but decides not to keep the baby and has an abortion.
I fell in love with Gabi after reading the first few pages. She is an amazing young woman with a good head on her shoulders. Her home life is sad, but she overcomes so much to be who she is and is striving for so much more. The story is told using journal entries written by Gabi throughout her senior year. Gabi laces her entries with her poems that reveal deep emotions and insight into her heart. The writing is so real and the author masters the voice of a teenage girl straddling two cultures, that of her Mexican family's heritage, and that of her own birthplace, America.
Isabel Quintero's website:
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