Week 11 has started! We’ll be back on two chapters per week (with one exception) until we finish.
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Chapter 17: Is a 92 really something to flip out over that much? 
I know you’re gunning for MIT, Alexia, but this felt blown out of proportion. If you had gotten like an 85 or something, sure.
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I thought she got a 9? Maybe I missed 92. I wasn’t really familiar with what scoring scale she was using, I got the feeling a 10 was the best mark. I’m used to teen US high school TV students getting grades from A to F normally.
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Técnicamente es un nueve con dos, pero sigue siendo un maldito nueve y creo que es la primera vez que caigo tan bajo.
I was assuming the “con dos” here meant is was a 92, but maybe I misread?
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Hmm, I don’t know what that means. Perhaps 92% is the right way to understand this. I guess we get the point anyway, she usually gets amazing grades - this was still a very good grade just not up to her usually incredibly high standards.
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Towards the beginning of chapter 18, where Nina is remembering her old relationships, there’s a sentence I can’t parse:
En cambio, alguno no lo era tanto y tampoco funcionó.
I’m pretty sure she’s still going on about how of course those relationships couldn’t go well, but I don’t get this sentence at all.
I’m glad (?) Nina is worrying about this! I hope she maybe confides in her sister and then they decide to either not go (what with Alexia being grounded); or go with Cris anyway.
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Probably needs the previous sentence for context to make sense of this one:
Summary
¿Quizá por eso todas mis relaciones anteriores han salido tan mal? Bueno, la mayor parte de mis antiguos novios eran unos capullos egocéntricos, es normal que no pudiese funcionar. En cambio, alguno no lo era tanto y tampoco funcionó. Ni siquiera cerca.
Perhaps this is why all my previous relationships have gone so badly? Well, the majority of my old boyfriends were self-centred jerks, so it’s normal that they wouldn’t work. However, one [boyfriend] was not such [a jerk] and [that relationship] didn’t work either. Not even close.
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Thanks so much, again. 
It’s sentences like these that make me realize that while I get away with a lot with my spotty knowledge reading Spanish, I really should brush up on how the grammar works at some point.
Now that I see your translation, I can tell how you got there, too. I don’t know why I’m so unmotivated when it comes to Spanish grammar studies. 
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Week 12 has begun!
I feel that; feels like I’m reading and understanding purely based on vibes sometimes…
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I don’t think I checked in last week, but I just finished this week’s reading (chapters 19-20).
The plot thickens…
Ouch, that Bible passage was a lot harder to read, compared to the rest of this book 
.
I really feel for Nina, as she’s starting to have to come to terms with liking women for real… It’s too bad her situation doesn’t leave her with much support, since she doesn’t really have anyone else she can confide in besides Alexia, and she’s too afraid to tell her…
It’s tough to see how either Nina or Alexia can really resolve the whole party situation, either. But, man, Nina withholding information from Alexia and Cris really isn’t helping here. Hopefully she’ll finally come clean to them in the next week’s reading.
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Week 13 has begun!
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Chapter 21/22
Well that took an interesting twist at the end there. They’ve clearly been heading towards a breakup so that wasn’t too much of a surprise. It’s an interesting writing style when you can see both inside the heads of both parties and know they just need to chill out and communicate better.
Alexia is good at calling out Nina as being a liar, but she’s probably told more than Nina recently!
But the mysterious phone message, (followed by more lies from Alexia, I can’t see Cris is going to be happy if she finds out she’s gone to the party), and then a drunk Nina who’s already done some stupid things. Not sure where this is going next chapter.
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(Week 13 spoilers)
Things are going to explode for sure. I’m hoping a drunken Nina is what it takes for her to really say everything in her heart to Alexia so they can settle things once and for all.
I have to say, that intervention Ezra set up sure was something. I was kind of surprised she cared enough to go through with it.
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We’re at week 14!
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Chapter 23/24
I’m struck again it must be so hard being a teenager in age of smartphone videos and social media. I’m so happy that my mistakes when younger weren’t filmed and shared for the whole world to see. Or that anonymous strangers might comment and leave abuse!
But it was particularly striking here, where Nina is going through a very difficult personal journey, exploring her sexuality and dealing with her own fears about what it might mean to be a lesbian, and after foolishly having a drunken conversation about it in public, now faces judgement from all her peers.
Meanwhile, Cris, who has perhaps been portrayed as one of the more fragile characters, was rock solid for Alexia this week. She shrugged off the lying very easily and was a big support for Alexia. I liked the moment where she joked - if your girlfriend ever needs to kiss someone else at a party again let her know I’m available!
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I liked those two chapters; you put my thoughts down well!
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We’re on our penultimate week! I might try to see if I can finish the book this week, just to clear out my reading list a bit more before 2025 really hits.
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I finished… the whole rest of the book! I wanted to have finished at least ONE book in Spanish in the year 2024, so I rushed ahead a little bit so that I could count this one…
I actually finished half of these chapters last week, but didn’t have time to post in the thread.
Chapters 21-24
This chunk, when everything started going down, got me reading a little bit ahead, haha. I kept thinking, “I don’t really want to leave off on this note,” so I kept reading until I got to a point where things were less of a downer, hahaha.
Totally echoing Micki’s thoughts on being a teenager in the era of social media! It made me think, too, about how the genre of YA itself has changed with the advent of things like tiktok and such. It just adds so many more complications when everyone is expected to be online publicly in at least some capacity…
When I was a teenager, social media was still in the fairly early stages, where it definitely existed and people my age used it, but I don’t think it was nearly as tied to our real identities, besides maybe like facebook. And on facebook, the reach your photos and videos had was mostly limited to people you already knew.
So Nina’s world of having her whole life broadcast to the whole internet is just unimaginable to me. I’m sure a lot of it was exaggerated for dramatic effect in the novel, but I’ve met plenty of teenagers who are definitely very much on tiktok and the like, and I have no doubt that there are all kinds of new pressures and anxieties that come along with that.
It makes every small thing that happens to you so much bigger when anything could go viral, and then suddenly there’s a record of you at some of your most vulnerable and shameful moments…
Maybe our lives were never meant to be that public, huh?
Chapters 25-29 (end)
I’m glad that Nina finally stood up to Ezra and spoke up for all of the kids who had felt victimized by her. It’s bittersweet that it happened right as they’re about to graduate and Ezra is presumably leaving the school anyway, but it was a nice moment.
My own high school years are kind of a blur because I sort of skipped the last two years and went right to college, but I do remember one of the popular kids at my high school coming out as gay maybe about a month before we graduated. I was happy for him and glad that he did that so that he could set an example for other kids and show them that even in a conservative town, you could be openly gay and still more or less be well-liked by the community at large, but I was sad that he hadn’t felt comfortable doing that earlier, instead of right before he was about to leave high school.
I’m glad that Nina and Alexia managed to reconcile, and that they seemingly found a way for both of them to continue pursuing their own respective dreams and futures without having to break up.
I liked the book overall! It was easy to read, which was what I needed right now when I have so little energy to study, and the plot was compelling enough to keep me wanting to read the next chapter.
I’m glad the club picked it, and I hope everyone else had a good time with it!
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And done! Wasn’t able to finish it before the end of 2024, but close enough. Thoughts below.
Thoughts
I can’t comment too much on the story; it was cute and fulfilled its purpose, and that’s basically all I needed. This felt like a pretty decent confidence booster for reading in Spanish for me, insofar as it was a good affirmation that a novel could be relatively painless given the right circumstances. La Ciudad de las Bestias was also good, but I think there were just enough unknowns in that one to not be a perfect case study for me.
Thank you all for reading with me, and I look forward to our next book! And congratulations to @HopeWaterfall on finishing with us! 
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I think we’ve all finished now?
Thoughts from me
This was a great choice for a read in that it was a full story aimed at older readers, but a lovely simplicity of language and vocab. I looked up very few words in this book and often just read without thinking I was reading in another language. What I did look up included a bit of basketball terminology and some rude words!
Like eefara, the story had enough to keep me interested. And actually as it was quite different to anything I normally read it gave some things to think about - living as a teen and broadcasting your life on social media, teenage relationships with parents, and of course the journey of a teenager exploring their sexuality.
The male characters came off rather badly in this book, with a little redemption for Nina’s dad at the end. The Christian characters came off extremely badly (with no redemption…)
After a book in which they spent their time tingling at the slightest glance of each others fingertips, of a hint of tongue in a kiss, it was funny that they ended up full on naked in bed for the last chapter!
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