When SparkPress reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in receiving a copy of Mona Alvarado Frazier’s young adult debut The Garden of Second Chances (6/6/2023), I said “sure.” As a former immigration attorney who worked primarily with the undocumented in removal proceedings and in the cross-sections with criminal and family law, I was immediately interested in the story of an undocumented 17-year-old convicted of a crime she didn’t commit who is trying to retain custody of her infant child. As much as I wanted to love it, it wasn’t for me.
The novel is essentially Orange is the New Black, only with a younger cast of characters. The blurb misleads the reader into thinking a prison garden that Juana develops and cultivates plays a huge role in her deciding to fight the system and fight for custody of her daughter; spoiler, the garden is barely given a cursory role. The blurb also misleads the reader into thinking that this is going to be an appeal of a conviction of voluntary manslaughter; the conviction is not appealed despite clear grounds for such (she’s gaslit into thinking she cannot appeal because too much time has passed) and she’s not fighting for her innocence, she’s petitioning the board for a reduction in her sentence based on mitigated factors. (Her factors being her innocence.) Had the novel focused on her rising up, learning enough English in the library to craft her own legal argument and then being successful in court, this could have truly been a novel about the resilience of sunflowers. But her innocence, the custody dispute, and the garden are all under-developed and rushed in favor of the more dramatic OITNB-esque dynamics of the facility and the inmates.
It’s an easy to digest young adult novel, but I was expecting something more – something different. The voice of an undocumented teenage mother who is a domestic violence survivor and who is convicted of the voluntary manslaughter of her abuser and who is fighting her abuser’s mother for custody of her child – I want that story so bad.
A Girl Named Tommi 