Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe

This is an ambitious book.  Helen Thorpe is a journalist whose initial idea is to follow four high school girls who are Mexican-American, two of whom are in the country legally and two of whom are not.  Halfway through her research for the book, Denver (where the girls live) becomes embroiled in a huge immigration conflict, when an illegal immigrant kills a police officer.  Thorpe includes this incident into her book, with a particular vantage point: her husband is the mayor of Denver at the time.

So there is a lot going on in the book.  I most enjoyed reading about the girls' experiences as they grew into young adults in college.  They struggled with basic logistics of paying for school - doubly difficult for the illegal girls - a well as complex emotional issues around identity and belonging.  The girls each had families that spanned Mexico and America, and several of them had significant family pressures on top of everything else they were dealing with.  I was also interested to see what kind of private funding the illegal girls were able to find.

Slightly less interesting were the sections on the crime and trial of the man who killed the police officer.  While I'm sure it was central to Thorpe's life at the time, it confused the narrative for me.  I understood that it had a profound effect on the city and subsequently on the girls, but I am not sure she wove it together tightly enough. 

It is a testament to Thorpe's journalistic background that I finished the book unsure of what her take on illegal immigration is.  I did, however, finish the book left with the one thing I think she wanted her readers to ponder: what do we do with young adults who have been in the U.S. illegally their entire lives, once they become adults?  I don't know the answer to that question and I'm not sure that Thorpe does either.  But I did see that as a complexity in the immigration debate I had not thought about previously.

I liked that this book made me think, I just wish it had been more cohesive.