Does My Body Offend You?

I press the megaphone harder against my mouth and say, loud and clear, for the entire world to hear me this time, “I will not be your victim.”

I can't believe how many important themes are presented in this book: feminism, race, class, being a refugee, body autonomy, sexual violence, family relationships across generations, allyship—that's not even a full list. At the same time, the story never reads as a pamphlet on these topics or anything. The characters are fully realized, relatable, and easy to root for, even when they make the kind of messy mistakes that are inevitable when you're a teenager faced with all the complications of the world around you. It was great to see how each of those mistakes made Malena, Ruby, and others around them, like Carlos and Saraida, actually think, analyze, and grow from the experience. I also really liked how the plot beats were distributed across the two POVs, such as showing Ruby's big apology at the end through Malena's POV—it felt important somehow.

One thing I especially enjoyed was the inspection of the intersections of privilege and marginalization; how someone can have more privilege than another person in some situations, but also face the kind of struggles the other person never has to come across. It was shown very well with the relationship between Ruby and Carlos. And something I enjoyed even more was the whole subject of allyship, and how important it is, when you're trying to help somebody to be heard, to amplify their voice instead of crowding it out with yours. No one is better at explaining a struggle and the ways to help with it than the person who's actually facing it.

One thing that made the book a bit difficult to read for me personally was the amount of Spanish. Objectively speaking, I really loved it, because it's genuinely important to the plot that centers on Latinx characters. On the other hand, since I don't know Spanish, it also made it harder to get immersed in Malena's chapters—the number of Spanish words without translation made me acutely aware I was reading about people who are foreigners for me, if that makes sense? I absolutely wouldn't want to lose a single Spanish word from this book, but I would have appreciated it if there were footnotes with translations included. A lot of the time, it was easy enough to fathom out the meaning of most words based on context, but sometimes I felt like I was missing out on some important meanings and I had to stop reading and google. On the plus side, I now feel like my knowledge of Spanish is sliiiiiightly above zero! :D