The Go-Between

Gr 7 Up—Fifteen-year-old Camilla and her wealthy family live in a mansion in Mexico City, complete with bodyguards and staff. She wears designer clothes and participates in the "Rich Kids of Mexico City" Instagram account, where teens flaunt wealth and status. The family's prosperity is the result of Cammi's mother's career as a renowned telenovela actress and her father's success as a voice-over artist in movies. Even her older brother, now living in Switzerland, excels academically, while Cammi rides the current of their fame. When a jealous "friend" outs the teen's mother's anxiety issues, Cammi and her family decide to take a sabbatical, which coincides with a television sitcom job for her mother in Los Angeles. Once there, Camilla discovers that immigrating to a new country is not easy: her mother struggles with her acting role of a maid, her father misses home, and Cammi feels slapped by the racist perceptions toward Mexicans at her elite private school. In fact, she realizes that it is simpler to go along with their stereotypical assumptions that she is a poor "chola" on scholarship than to explain the truth and lose her newfound anonymity. Yet the constant strain of spinning lies becomes wearing, and when the inevitable happens, Camilla is forced to reconsider what she values, make amends, and accept her own identity. This book presents a fairy-tale lifestyle not often seen in Latinx literature, while also exploring themes of biculturalism/biracialism and racist stereotypes about Mexican immigrants.