“Maybe mañana will be better…” says the main character, Lupita Torres, who is known as Lupita Mañana. Lupita is a thirteen-year-old, skinny girl, with a brother, Salvador, a few years older than her. This story is an unrealistic,boring tale about Lupita and Salvador being put in a situation where they desperately need to cross the border from Mexico to America. After the two teenagers cross the border, the rest of the story is about their struggles in America with trying to find work, and hiding from “la migra”, or the immigration police. Lupita Mañana could have been really exciting at parts, with the quote “Maybe mañana will be better…” thumping through your head, but the author, Patricia Beatty, made the characters too lucky. This resulted in the story being unrealistic and boring, leaving me saying “Maybe the next chapter will be better…” just as Lupita had said about mañana, and the mañana of this book was not better.

One example of an unrealistic scene would be when Lupita and Salvador hid from anyone who might turn them in to la migra in a hopper car and all of the train cars were checked except for their hopper car. This was unrealistic because all of the train cars would have been checked at this point in time. Also, it was unrealistic when one of the railroad workers caught Lupita and Salvador and he helped them rather than turning them in to la migra. An example of something that was boring was that the book became very predictable because chapter after chapter ended on a cliff hanger and then was positively resolved in the next chapter. Also, a boring part was when Beatty was writing about Lupita’s and Salvador’s travel through the mountains to get to Indio. This scene was boring because it kept dragging on and on. All of this shows why this book was unrealistic and boring.

This book was like a desperate fisher; it never caught me, and I just got farther and farther away from the line as the book went. The entire story was just slow and an unexpected fantasy which really upset me. I would not recommend this book to anyone and if you are interested in this topic then you should look in to other books. One book that I was reminded of was Under the Feet of Jesus, which is a much better book than Lupita Mañana is.