“The elephant in the room,” I repeat. I love these unexpected gifts in English, these delightful little bundles of creativity that sneak up on me when I least expect it. “I like that. So what’s this elephant?”

Girl in Translation was the last book I enjoyed with such a cultural exchange, but this worked for me just as well, if not better, given that I could follow most of the Spanish. A brilliant, electrifying tale of adapting to a new language, dreaming to belong in a new culture and, perhaps most importantly, being understood. I guess I had biases of my own; believing that so much of the US was already Spanish-centric, so this shattered that illusion pleasingly and was hard to put down!