Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I finally finished my first 2023 Newbery on Wednesday–Andrea Beatriz Arango’s Iveliz Explains It All–and despite how long it took me to read, it was still an emotional experience. (Which tells you something about it right there, because it takes an extraordinary book to still be impactful when read over a long period of time.) My oldest daughter has been struggling with depression for the last year or more and my father has vascular dementia, so a story about a teenage girl dealing with depression whose grandmother with Alzheimer’s moves in with her family? It was guaranteed to pull at me. The need for Ive to get (and be willing to accept) the help she needed drove me throughout the reading of her story, and her journey is one that teens all over the country–I’d imagine all over the world–need to experience. Our struggling children need to know there is hope and to understand how and when to ask for help; those of us who love people who are struggling need as many resources as possible in order to know what to do to help them. This is a story that matters.

My one struggle with it, however, was the quantity of Spanish involved. I took enough Spanish in high school and college that I don’t need translations of simple phrases, and yet I found myself googling words and phrases frequently enough to slow my progress through the book. My struggling daughter is in AP Spanish right now and will likely do just fine; her 14-year-old sister, however, loves verse novels but hates feeling like she doesn’t know or understand what’s going on, and I have a hard time imagining her making it through Iveliz. (She hasn’t taken a language at all yet; she’s planning on French at some point.) It makes perfect sense for the Spanish to be there–Mimi has just moved from Puerto Rico, which is where Iveliz’s mami is from–but without translations included, I feel like the book is going to reach a smaller audience than it should.

On the other hand, I’ve spent some time wondering how the translations could be included without interrupting the flow of the story, and no easy solution is presenting itself. Asterisks interrupt, flipping to a back glossary interrupts even more, and adding English translations across from any Spanish phrases would certainly affect the look of the text, messing with the effect of the blank verse. The best solution I can come up with is including translations at the bottom of the page–like footnotes–in a separate line for each use of Spanish WITHOUT numbering them. (Because really, readers are mostly going to figure it out. Although Spanish words and phrases could be written in a slightly different font if translations are going to be included?) That would make the book a good deal longer, however, and do you include translations for even the one or two word instances? That would start to feel clunky.

Ultimately, Iveliz Explains It All is poignant and heart-wrenching and important and hopeful, and I’d recommend it to anyone struggling with depression–or grief. If you’re one who likes to know exact meanings when you read, however, make sure you keep Google Translate open!