Item: The Things We Didn’t Know
Rating: 3.5
Author: Catherine

The Things We Didn’t Know by Elba Iris Pérez
Published by Gallery Books
Publication date: February 6, 2024
Genres: Book Clubs, Debut, Fiction, Childhood, Coming-of-age, Cultural, Historical

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When Andrea is 9-years-old she finds herself and her little brother Pablo uprooted from their home in Woronoco, Massachusetts and left in a small Puerto Rican village with an aunt they’ve never met. All because their mother hates living in their small 1950s factory town in America and is lonely. This unsettling turn of events is just the beginning of Andrea’s voyage from childhood to adult as a person torn between countries and cultures in Elba Iris Perez’s debut novel, The Things We Didn’t Know.

The children have been taken without their father’s knowledge. Their mother has left for the city, ostensibly to find a job so they can move into their own home. Weeks pass and instead of their mother, Andrea and Pablo are cared for by their aunt, who while caring is different from any woman they’ve ever seen. She dresses and acts like a man and runs the family’s farm. Slowly they acclimate, learning Spanish, making friends, enjoying a life of freedom, and even starting school in the fall. Their mother returns, bringing more disruption and instability until their father finds them and brings them back to Woronoco.

The return brings security, but now both Andrea and Pablo are outsiders. School presents challenges, but it’s at home that life changes the most for Andrea. At 10, with her father working fulltime at the paper mill, she becomes the de facto woman-of-the-house. Her childhood is over as she’s now responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, and other household duties. There’s no impropriety in The Things We Didn’t Know, but to her father it’s the natural progression. Some schooling is fine, but a girl needs to prepare for marriage.

There is much to absorb in The Things We Didn’t Know. As children Andrea and Pablo live a confusing life of dislocation and instability. No matter where they are, they don’t fit in. By the time they’re teens the problem is more pervasive for Andrea as women are experiencing more freedom in America in the 60s. This sea change clashes against the confines of a very conservative Puerto Rican upbringing within a small like-minded community. Even as more family arrives from Puerto Rico, bringing her beloved aunt and female cousins who advocate for her to be allowed a social life, her father remains locked into opinions and beliefs from an earlier time.

The Things We Didn’t Know comes together as a vivid portrait of not only a specific time and place, but of a culture within that environment. Perez conveys the world of a conservative tightknit community and one young woman’s path through that with authenticity. Andrea’s desire to be the good girl her father wishes even as she comes to realize his limitations and outdated beliefs is poignant and relatable. The writing skews a bit basic, not in a YA way, but that of a new writer. It inhibits the novel’s full potential, but I’m still interested in the perspective she’ll bring to what she writes next.

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