"Another day finished, gracias a Dios." Seventeen-year-old Marisa's mother has been saying this for as long as Marisa can remember. Her parents came to Houston from Mexico. They work hard, and they expect Marisa to help her familia. And they expect her to marry a boy from the neighborhood, to settle down, and to have grandbabies. If she wants a job, she could always be an assistant manager at the local grocery store. At school, it's another story. Marisa's calc teacher expects her to ace the AP test and to get into an engineering program in Austin—a city that seems unimaginably far away. When her home life becomes unbearable, Marisa seeks comfort elsewhere—and suddenly neither her best friend nor boyfriend can get through to her. Caught between the expectations of two different worlds, Marisa isn't sure what she wants—other than a life where she doesn't end each day thanking God it's over. What Can't Wait—the gripping debut novel from Ashley Hope Pérez—tells the story of one girl's survival in a world in which family needs trump individual success, and self-reliance the only key that can unlock the door to the future.
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Ashley Hope Pérez
Reading is one of my passions, and maybe if I hadn’t also fallen in love with teaching, I might have become a librarian just so that I could be around as many books as possible. But I’m also a big talker, a tendency that doesn’t evaporate when I cross a library’s threshold. No doubt I would have been blacklisted before I even got through my library science degree or, at the least, branded “The Loud Librarian.” Luckily for me, my experiences teaching bilingual kindergarten, Montessori 6-9, high school English, and university literature classes sold me on the writing and teaching life. I especially enjoyed my three years teaching high school in Houston, where many of my students were convinced they hated to read and write at the beginning of the year and equally persuaded of the opposite by the end of the year. I credit them with transforming me into an author, and I jump at the chance to reconnect with young readers through school visits and events. Even my first students knew I was a big nerd, and I proved them right when I completed a PhD in comparative literature at Indiana University. Now I teach world literature at The Ohio State University and do research on Latin American literature, Latina/o literature, and narrative ethics. My husband and best friend Arnulfo is also a professor at OSU. When I’m not reading, writing, or teaching, I am hanging out with our two sons, Liam Miguel and Ethan Andrés. In the scraps of time that remain, I like to run (I did the Houston Marathon in 2007 and the Chicago Marathon in 2009), eat local, bake (but let’s don’t revive the “Cookie Girl” nickname, please), watch movies, and play the occasional game of Scrabble. Arnulfo is a hard-core Metallica fan who is also addicted to Vicente Fernández’s soulful ballads, which means I also get plenty of exposure to an eclectic mix of music. Ask me about my novels, schedule a visit, or share your thoughts by sending me an email. P.S. Awesome schools, programs, and places that have shaped my path: Bard College at Simon’s Rock, The University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University Bloomington, ACE (an Americorps program), Teach for America, and the German House Co-op.
3 Livros
1 Seguidor