For All We Knew, We Came From Pieces of Corn at the Beginning of Everything

~Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything~
By Raquel Vasquez Gilliland
Amazon ~ Powell's

It’s been three years since ICE raids and phone calls from Mexico and an ill-fated walk across the Sonoran. Three years since Sia Martinez’s mom disappeared. Sia wants to move on, but it’s hard in her tiny Arizona town where people refer to her mom’s deportation as “an unfortunate incident.”

Sia knows that her mom must be dead, but every new moon Sia drives into the desert and lights San Anthony and la Guadalupe candles to guide her mom home.

Then one night, under a million stars, Sia’s life and the world as we know it cracks wide open. Because a blue-lit spacecraft crashes in front of Sia’s car…and it’s carrying her mom, who’s very much alive.

As Sia races to save her mom from armed-quite-possibly-alien soldiers, she uncovers secrets as profound as they are dangerous in this stunning and inventive exploration of first love, family, immigration, and our vast, limitless universe.


Though I planned to read this as one of the 25 Reads of December from RivetedLit, I actually missed the deadline for opening the book before the day was up, so I ended up picking this up from my library as both an e-book and an audiobook instead. This one caught my eye firstly from its gorgeous cover, and secondly due to its interesting premise which promised to blend immigration issues with aliens?! Bizarre? Maybe. But surely it had to be exciting, right?

First thing I've gotta come clean with is that I totally misread the book description, as I assumed Sia herself was an undocumented immigrant who was separated from her mother during their desert crossing. Not a huge deal, mind you, when compared with my other mistake of not reading the last paragraph about alien soldiers. This made me question the entire second half of the book being real.

The first half of the book really centers on establishing Sia's normal. She's a 17-year-old American girl of Latin-American descent maneuvering through high school as best she can while dealing with racist classmates (and their racist Sheriff father) and uncomprehending teachers. You'd think a blossoming romance might help until it starts to drive a wedge between herself and her best friend, and serves to trigger some PTSD from a previous sexual assault. All of that while still coming to terms with her mom's deportation and death, despite her grandmother's ghost constantly telling her otherwise. So, yeah, quite a bit to cover in her regular life, which takes up a good 50% of the book.

And then the spaceship comes in.

Honestly, though there were a couple scenes previously dealing with the weird lights in the desert, I was completely convinced that the spaceship was a hallucination. Or a dream. The whole sequence of events just kept getting more and more fantastic, what with her mom being alive, the government being involved, aliens, experimentation, super-powers, chase sequences, leaking the story to the media, having a big showdown, characters dying, and— I just kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. This was too fantastical. Too much crazy, not enough explanation, too much speed, and yet...we're just supposed to accept everything along with Sia and crew.

I'm not saying the two halves didn't tie together. The conflicts that showed up in the first half carried over and progressed in the second; like Sia and her BFF's argument getting discussed and resolved, and Sia's trust issues with her boy carry over for a good chunk of the second half. But absolutely nothing in the first half prepared me at all for the crazy, new alien plot that crashes in. Even knowing "a blue-lit spacecraft crashes in front of Sia’s car…and it’s carrying her mom" was in the book's description, I still doubted the reality of everything following that point because it had nothing leading up to it. And what carried over could have easily be explained by a bump on the head and Sia's subconscious taking over.

So, I guess you could say the Sci-Fi elements really didn't work for me in the context of the story as a whole. Like I said, I think my main issue was the speed with which they all got introduced. Suddenly Sia's mom is there, and she has super-healing and super-speed, and the government is after her. (Okay, so that last part wasn't a stretch, considering she's already been deported from the U.S. once already [more on that in a minute]). But actually the government has been experimenting on illegal immigrants caught crossing through the deserts, and they're trying to splice them with alien DNA, and Sia's mom is the only survivor so far, and she managed to escape in a spaceship that can only be flown by someone with alien DNA, and the government will stop at nothing to bring her back, so she's gonna expose what they've been doing online and to the media so they can't get away with what they're doing, which they do a little, but the government shows up with another super-powered person, and they want to capture Sia, too, because of her shared genetics with her mom and continued experimentation, and— AGH!

The point where Sia sees her mom alive (following the crashed spaceship) is on page 190. The point I just finished summarizing is on page 270. In a story that's 409 pages total. And that's only the beginning of the crazy. Did I mention that love is a vital, tangible element in the alien issue? Do you see why I had some trouble believing this all wasn't some dream or coma-state?

Okay, okay, I'll lay off criticizing the Sci-Fi plot, since by this point it's been beaten it into the ground.

I thought the immigration issue—illegal aliens—plot was a clever jumping off point for a story about space aliens. And really, the parts that addressed the racism against brown-skinned Americans, whether of Haitian, Mexican, or Arabian descent, were some of my favorites. Not that they happened, obviously, but that they were believable and emotional. Even the most cartoonish of racists, a gas station owner they encounter while on the run, felt disturbingly real and heartbreaking, especially knowing what's happening throughout the U.S. right now. I mean, even after reading Angie Thomas's books, this is the first one I can remember reading that's preceded by a trigger warning for Racist Violence, among other things.

Another of the trigger warnings is for sexual assault, which thankfully doesn't happen between Sia and her current romantic interest, Noah, but does pose an obstacle in their relationship. Sia and Noah's relationship was actually quite heartwarming, with them both working through various issues involving trust and, for Sia, PTSD. Though she wants to be sexually intimate with Noah at a couple points, she's ashamed to find herself unable to deal with her triggers, yet he's completely understanding and supportive of her, helping her be intimate by working around her triggers, even if it doesn't completely satisfy him. Yeah, the sex scenes were more descriptive than I tend to expect in a YA book, but I felt they were a natural progression of their relationship while simultaneously showing their compatibility, especially concerning the whole trigger workaround. It was sweet without being completely cliche.

I also appreciated the insights into Sia's heritage. Most of the book is told in very short chapters, many of which are short asides that focus on different family stories, legends, or flashbacks from her mother or grandmother. One contained the title of this review. Another introduced the legend of La Llorona in order to compare it to one of the group's pursuers. Sia's deceased grandmother is also a reoccurring presence in the book, sometimes speaking to her directly, other times merely appearing as a scent to comfort or warn the living. Sia calls her a bruja once or twice, but overall doesn't think twice about communication with the dead.

And while Sia doesn't disbelieve the science she learns in school, she also doesn't see any issues with supplementing things we don't yet know with mythical elements, such that the moon can simultaneously be a rock floating millions of miles away from earth due to gravity, and a sentient being who decided to birth her own body every month so the plants wouldn't grow too much. I love this view of things, allowing her to see and accept the magic in her world while still learning what science finds as well. And really, it makes just as much sense as when her Christian friend calls healthy children miracles, don't you think?

Overall, this was a mixed bag for me. I loved the slice-of-life narrative that dominated the first half of the story (with the romance, heritage, and social justice issues), but I just never bought into the Sci-Fi storyline that crashed into the second half. I honestly do think combining the issues of illegal aliens with space aliens was a clever idea, I just didn't find the execution of that combination to ever come together. I don't know if it was the breakneck speed of the story, the continual escalation of wtf moments one after the other, or simply my own cynical nature that made me refuse to suspend my disbelief, but I just couldn't reconcile that second half with the first. I still would recommend this to those who are looking for a YA book with a focus on Mexican-American traditions, immigration and racism struggles, and a romance that isn't afraid to deal with and work through trauma, but also enjoy huge twists and action-packed Sci-Fi. And who knows, maybe I'll come back to this one in the future and find the whole allegory works great the second time around.

Read by Inés del Castillo
Unabridged Length: 8.2 Hours
Listened at 1.5x Speed

The narrator did a great job on the whole. All the character voices seemed distinct, emotions and status were taken into account (like when one character is choked or exhausted, their dialogue changed accordingly), and the Spanish language came through clearly.

I did find the overall pacing to be a little slow. Since the chapters are short (there are over 200 of them in a 400 page book), there were obviously a lot of breaks, and since I was reading my e-book along with the audio, I found myself skimming forward slightly each time they read the chapter number. I can imagine the counting getting a bit ridiculous on its own, especially in the 1 or 2 paragraph chapters sounding like, "One-hundred thirty four, blah blah blah. One-hundred thirty five, blah blah." Obviously I don't know if there's a solution, or if its just an inevitable quirk of this particular book.

Overall, this was fine for those already familiar with the audiobook experience as a whole, but does pose some unique quirks that might disuade some from trying it. The previously mentioned chapters pose one issue. Another concerns the language of the book. There are quite a few lines in Spanish that never receive a translation, so unless you're fluent or just unbothered (like I am), you might prefer a text version if you want to run any quick Google Translates. So unless you use audiobooks as your only/preferred option, maybe use a text version in tandem or instead of for this story.