Merci Suarez Changes Gears by Meg Medina

Source of book: Audiobook from the library.

This book is part of out not-particularly-systematic exploration of the Newbery Award winners and honor books. This book won the award in 2019. In addition, this book is part of my personal project as homeschool dad and aspiring decent human being to introduce my kids (and myself) to books written by non-white authors.

Meg Medina, like the title character of her book, is the American-born child of Cuban immigrants, and the characters (although not the plot) of Merci Suárez Changes Gears are largely drawn from her experiences growing up in a multigenerational extended family. 

Merci Suárez is a sixth grade girl who has managed (like her genius older brother) to get into a prestigious private school in Southern Florida on a scholarship. Which isn’t particularly fun - nothing like being the working class kind of immigrant parents in a school full of rich kids with doctors for parents and who take vacations to the Bahamas. On their own boats. The mean girls, led by Edna Santos, have it in for her ever since the tall and handsome Michael moved there from Minnesota. But the worst of it is that Merci’s abuelo, Lolo, has been acting increasingly strange, and her family won’t talk about it at all.

For Merci, the worst part of all of this is that Lolo has always been her confidant, her source for good advice and encouragement, and as he slips away from her into Alzheimer’s disease, she finds she has to improvise on her own - and even care for him like a child when he has bad days.

That’s the basic setup for the story, which alternates between school and domestic drama, both of which come at a time when Merci is changing rapidly from a child to a woman, and is already disoriented as to who she is and wants to be. 

Overall, I thought the book handled its themes with a delicate touch, refusing to make any of the characters into true villains or heroes. They are just people. And many are kids, all with insecurities, who make decisions like most kids - which is not always for the best. The adults are likewise human. For the most part, decent, ordinary people, and the stresses of the situations sometimes lead them to make questionable decisions as well. 

If I had to list my favorite parts of the book, I would say that the depiction of the multigenerational extended family, living semi-communally in the group of three houses they refer to as Las Casitas was one of the best. I knew people similar to that in the neighborhoods I grew up in, where grandparents or aunts and uncles were part of daily life. 

I also thought that the complex dynamics of middle school relationships were both accurate and hilarious. The parsing of the meaning of “maybe likes you” garnered a laugh even among the more cynical of my kids. I did not very much enjoy my Jr. High days, although they weren’t objectively horrible or anything. But, as a very short (I was praying desperately to reach five foot three back then) and hopelessly nerdy kid, I wasn’t exactly hot romantic material (well, that part hasn’t changed either - I have yet to experience women throwing themselves at me…) The adults liked me: I was polite and smart and functioned well in those circles. But among my peers, well, different story. I wasn’t bullied either, probably because I was scrappy, but I was assumed to be gay, or at least very odd, and patted on the head more times than I care to remember. (Maybe it’s a violinist thing, who knows?) But I wouldn’t care to repeat that time in my life. 

The most perceptive part of the book has to be Merci’s fury when she discovers that everyone in her family has withheld the truth about Lolo from her. She has been treated like her little cousins - who she has to babysit for free. She finally worms the truth out of her brother, who gives her a demonstration on his brain model. (He aspires to become a doctor or a scientist.) Merci’s simmering, then boiling, fury is completely understandable - and totally justified. She has been expected to take on adult responsibilities, and endure the adult consequences of Lolo’s decline - she is the one who had to forgo trying out for the school soccer team, and spend her afternoons babysitting rather than earning money for a bike. She is the one expected to keep an eye on Lolo, without being given the knowledge to understand what is happening. 

So hell yes, she is furious. 

The adults haven’t been intentionally bad, of course, but they have done the annoying adult thing of underestimating children, and trying to protect them from unpleasantness. And yes, I am sure I have been guilty of this as a parent as well. I have made an effort, though, to not do that. Looking back, for much of my childhood, my parents did the same - they tried to treat us as fully human, deserving of a right to participate in family things like that, to know the truth, to be a part of major decisions that affected us. It was really a good thing for us at the time. Unfortunately, that didn’t continue as we got older. The first decision I recall where I felt I was railroaded into something that profoundly affected me, against my will, was when we joined Bill Gothard’s cultic homeschool group. I think in retrospect, it was a turning point from which things have never recovered. Rather than things getting better after I grew up and moved out, I feel I mostly lost my place in the family, with my parents and sister unilaterally making decisions together, and imposing them on me, my wife, and my kids. Although the situations were obviously not the same, I understood Merci’s frustration that she was expected to take on adult duties without being respected as an adult. It’s the old “don’t trouble yourself with asking why, just fulfil your role in the family” thing. And I wasn’t 11 years old when this blew up in my own case. Unfortunately, this led to fatal damage to relationships that probably will never heal. You can see why, though. 

In Merci’s case, when things do come to light, her family realizes it erred. Fascinatingly, it is Lolo who gets it first and best. And he tells the truth: he wanted to enjoy the way things were with Merci - his “precioso” - as long as he could, without casting a pall on the relationship before it was necessary. And, in his defense, he didn’t notice his own decline, because dementia does that. Eventually, though, Merci’s family does apologise, and return to the “no secrets” policy of days past. To see the first big step come from Lolo, the one person in the family with the best excuse (well, other than her brother, because he didn’t have much power either), was fascinating. 

This is where I am jealous of those families I know where extended families are functional - and new spouses can become true parts of the family. I have seen it. (To a degree, that is the case with my wife’s family, but geography means we only see each other once or twice a year, which isn’t the same as when they lived near us. You can’t really have that level of community closeness when you aren’t around each other.) I kind of had that for a while with more extended family, but again, geography and now Trumpism have made it out of reach. I do miss the past, before I found myself alienated from my religion and a mere visitor to my family. But shit happens, and happen it did in this case. 

Kind of a bizarre digression in light of the book, but I admit that I was moved - and a bit triggered - by this part of the book pretty deeply. The Suárez family isn’t perfect by any means, but family means correcting mistakes, and trying to repair damage, not doubling down on bad choices. I had a definite moment of grief over what might have been. (Exacerbated, for sure, by the holiday season, another in an increasing line in which there has been no emotional possibility of being together as an extended family.) 

I loved the way Medina let Merci vent her fury, too. This is a good development in modern books for kids - the way that “negative” emotions are allowed to be felt. This isn’t the moralizing of “be a good christian kid and always be happy even when shit is piled on you.” This is real, and the reader is encouraged to feel the frustration of being bullied by a mean girl you can’t really retaliate against because her father pretty much pays to keep the school in business and Merci is just a scholarship kid with a knack for getting into trouble. The reader is invited to judge along with Merci whether her family is sidelining her needs because she is a girl and because her brother is a genius who will do the family proud. 

But also, the way that individual instances of bad luck pile up to eventually create a shitshow is totally true. The family weathers so many setbacks. Tia’s husband deserts her when she is pregnant with twins. The family moves on, but this takes Abuela away from her job, so the overall income goes down. The twins cause trouble at school, and an extra day is lost dealing with that. When Lolo accidentally tries to take the wrong children home from school, horrid (and likely racist) assumptions mean the whole family has to deal with an extended police interrogation with Lolo cuffed in the back of a squad car. When Lolo needs to be watched, that means someone has to take on new jobs, from watching the twins to helping Papi with his painting business, to driving kids places, to...well, that final straw nearly breaks the family in many ways. But, because they are a (fairly) functional family, they pull together and find solutions. And part of the solution is to realize that Merci can’t just be a cog - she has to be a participant as she has come of age. 

Despite being a story about a middle schooler, this isn’t a light kids book. Shit gets real in this book, although there is nothing that I could see that would be inappropriate for younger kids. I work in elder law, so I deal with dementia and its effects all the time. I see no point in trying to “protect” children from the obvious. Far better to, as Roli finally does, be brutally honest: dementia is a progressive disease. It has no cure at this time. And it eats who a person is the way cancer eats the body. It sucks, bigtime. But knowing is better than not knowing, and children face reality far better than they are given credit for. 

I hope I haven’t created the impression this book is a downer. It really isn’t. There are a lot of humorous moments, from glitter “magic dust” as a means of occupying the twins, to an amputated set of eyebrows from a history project gone wrong. And ultimately, this is a story about people doing their best under difficult circumstances, and the possibility that we can make things right in the end. 

The audiobook was narrated by Frankie Corzo, who has acted in stuff, most notably Better Things. She also has a number of audiobooks on her resume, and did a fine job on this one.