After a friend recommended With the Fire on High, Elizabeth Acevedo’s first novel in verse was already on my radar. I was in my local library back in February and this was on display for Black History Month and I couldn’t resist grabbing it. I need more poetry in my life anyway.
The book is about Xiomara, a chubby, Afro-Latina teenager just trying to make it through high school with a super-conservative mother and a father who’s barely there. Writing poetry is how she copes with life’s challenges, and she happens to be very good at it, but she keeps it a secret. She’s afraid kids at school will make fun of her if they find out and her mother will kill her if she finds out.
But she comes up with a pen name for herself, and that’s where the title for the book comes from.
Xiomara starts dating a guy at school and it’s as magical as first relationships tend to be, especially when they’re just starting out, but they have to keep their relationship a secret because of the aforementioned super-conservative mother. She makes Xiomara attend church at least once a week (more often if she thinks Xiomara has done something to warrant more punishment and/or worship). She’s Catholic and firmly believes that anything even remotely sexual is damnable.
So Xiomara and her boyfriend manage to keep things quiet for a while, but eventually someone sees them kissing on the train and tells Xiomara’s mom, who makes her kneel on raw rice until her knees bleed.
When word gets around school that Xiomara was caught making out with some guy on the train, some assholes give her a hard time for it and her boyfriend sees the whole thing, but doesn’t intervene. Xiomara sees him do nothing and remembers that she’s the only one she can count on to protect herself. (Does that ever feel familiar!) So Xiomara does what she does best: she defends herself from the bullies and pushes away a confused teenaged boy who really liked her but didn’t know what to do in that moment.
So Xiomara is alone and angry – again – for a while before things get even worse. Her mother discovers her poetry journal, which includes lots of poems about her boyfriend and the dirty, dirty things she wants to do to him.
Keep in mind, assuming the poems in there are the same ones we see in the novel, they’re not actually dirty. Yes, there are poems about sexual longing and exploration, but nothing explicit or racey.
Unfortunately, that’s not how Xiomara’s mom sees it. From her perspective, anything even remotely sexual is enough to brand her daughter a whore. She burns the journal and that is Xiomara’s breaking point. After that, she sees red and cannot deal with her mother anymore, so she just walks out the door and ends up at the only place she can think to go at a time like this: her ex-boyfriend’s house.
Despite the fact that she hasn’t spoken to him since they were making out on the train, he doesn’t question her decision to show up unannounced in the middle of the night. He keeps her company and even lends her a shirt.
It doesn’t take long for them to start making out, but when it starts to go too far, Xiomara breaks it off and her ex-boyfriend (now boyfriend again?) doesn’t try to pressure her into giving up more than she’s will to give.
Throughout all of this, Xiomara has been questioning her faith, even as her mother has been forcing her to go to church multiple times a week plus confirmation classes so she can finally get confirmed (Xiomara somehow managed to escape it for the past two or three years, but her mother has decided this will be the year). As someone who was also raised Catholic and has since decided it’s not for me, I really appreciated the multiple poems we got to read with Xiomara’s thoughts on all of that.
Much to my surprise (and Xiomara’s), not only does her priest guess that she’s not really ready to get confirmed, but he doesn’t try to pressure her into doing something that doesn’t truly align with her beliefs.
And when Xiomara’s mom loses it and Xiomara leaves, oddly enough, it’s the priest who acts as mediator and gets them to talk through some of their issues. It’s not happily ever after, but it’s the beginning of a real relationship for them.
In the mean time, Xiomara’s English teacher has finally succeeded in convincing Xiomara to join the poetry club, where she shines. She finally has a place where she’s surrounded by like-minded students who love poetry as much as she does and are almost as good at it as she is. Best of all, they don’t make fun of her. Ever. They really are just there to support her, and although it takes her a while to accept that kind of support (considering she’s never had it), once she finally does, she’s able to live her best life.