Kara Martinez’s Mexican father was killed in an accident when she was eleven, and ever since then her mother has driven every ounce of evidence that he ever existed out of their lives. There are no signs around their house of their Mexican heritage – not even in the food they eat. Ever.  She expects Kara to dress and act a certain way, and because her mother’s moods control the household, Kara has learned over the years to suppress her opinions, her bad moods, her deep emotions, and everything that makes her who she is. Because when Kara told her mother that she was seeing ghosts in the hospital during her accident recovery, her mother had her sent to a psychiatric ward.  Only after years of therapy and medication and never speaking of the ghosts again has Kara been able to have some measure of freedom in her life.

So it’s understandable that she wouldn’t mention the signs to her mother either.

Not too long after the ghost incidences, Kara began seeing signs – clues to a person’s future. They appear on the person, usually around the chest area, and only in flashes. Sometimes there are a series of signs and Kara is driven to puzzle them out, to figure out the possible future in time to change it positively. Her first sign was fairly benign:

The first signs I actually followed came to me at the age of twelve, and the first puzzle had been simple. I’d seen signs before my first puzzle, but I hadn’t understood until then what I was supposed to do.

Not until one day in school, when I’d read a story about cats. Later, when I got home, I’d seen a television commercial about cats. Then Mom had come home, holding a magazine with a cat on the cover. When I went out to get something from Mom’s car, a cat walked past me, an image of a car on its fur as it strolled into the street.

I heard a car coming. The cat had stopped in the street to lick its paws. I ran forward, stomping my feet. The cat startled and rushed to the sidewalk. The car missed it entirely.

Kara hid the signs from everyone – not just her mother and brother, Jason, but also her best friend, Danielle. Everyone, that is, but the readers of her anonymous online blog, Secret Fates. She began the blog because she had to have some outlet for her secret.  It gets harder and harder, however, to hide who she really is from the world – especially when she sees a flash of a gun on a classmate’s chest.

Her investigation of that sign leads her to an accidental meeting with Anthony, a Mexican former gangbanger from “the wrong side of town.”   Encounters with some of Anthony’s friends and family bring her flashes of other signs, until she no longer knows who she’s actually supposed to be protecting. Complicating the matter is the chemistry between Anthony and Kara, which leads them to a romance that’s disapproved of by just about everyone they know. Kara refuses to give him up, though, even as the signs get more confusing.

Then one day notes start appearing in her locker. Someone knows that she’s the anonymous blogger behind Secret Fates. What do they want? Can Kara keep her secret? And if she can’t, what happens if she doesn’t figure out the recent signs before it’s too late?

One of the things I like best about this book is that Kara just…has the signs. She just does. The book isn’t really urban fantasy; she doesn’t uncover a secret world of magic under the streets of Valdez, California. She doesn’t have any other powers. Her family doesn’t have powers. And there’s no lengthy descriptions of the signs, or investigation into why they started. They just did. They just are. They’re not really what the book’s about.

What’s really important in this book is what happened to Kara’s FAMILY after the accident, not what happened to her, because it’s what happened to her family that drives many of the events. You are really going on a personal journey with Kara. You’re following her as she tries to figure out the signs, sure, but the whole time she’s trying to figure out herself. Trying to figure out how to balance the person she wants to be with the person her mother expects her to be. Trying to live a life where her father is remembered. Trying to eat the occasional forbidden carne asada taco. Trying to be more open with her best friend, to figure her brother out, to fall in love for the first time.

And to a certain extent it’s about race relations, especially the divisions that can arise between people of the same heritage who are separated by economic status or location or the portion of their heritage that’s full-blooded. It’s about being in a gang, and then not being in one anymore. It’s about breaking free of what’s expected of you and reaching out for everything you want.

I’m looking forward to more from Kelly Parra, and I’m going to need to read GRAFFITI GIRL now. However, I would appreciate it in the future if authors could refrain from using the titles of bad Genesis songs for their books. Intentional or not, it gave me a Very Annoying Earworm. So thanks for that, Ms. Parra.

I also want to say at the end here that I feel like Simon and Schuster has some room for improvement in promoting the MTV imprint with kids’ booksellers. (Penguin has the same problem with their teen books that are published under the Berkeley imprint.) I feel like I’m constantly missing MTV books.  I’m going to start looking a little closer in the future – I’ve read several now of very high quality, and I don’t want to miss any more.

This book was read as part of the Color Me Brown Book Challenge.

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