I will not spoil the reader's pleasure in watching the relationship between mother and daughter unfold, including a confrontation between 9-year-old Sonia and her mother, who locked herself in a dark room for months after her husband's death. But this is a story of human triumph, not just for the future justice, but for her mother, for her doctor brother and, though it may be a cliche, for the American dream.
It is a story too of Latin life in America, rich with descriptions of food and parties at her grandmother's house, complete with dancing, recitations of poetry and even forbidden seances, calling forth the spirits.
Sotomayor's tale of moving from the poverty of the projects to life at Princeton and Yale is entertaining and informative, reminding us that especially in the pre-Internet era, but probably now too, children whose parents live meager paycheck-to-paycheck lives can be amazingly isolated. Sotomayor didn't know what "the Ivies" were when a friend told her she should apply to them. The nuns at Cardinal Spellman High School suggested she apply to Fordham. But she initially lusted for Harvard after seeing Love Story, and she disdained Fordham, admitting ruefully in the book that she might have been more willing to apply there if she had known that many of the campus scenes in the movie were actually filmed at Fordham. In the end though, Harvard terrified her when she visited the school for an interview. It was so alien that she literally fled.
Later, her naivete leads to some hilarious scenes at Princeton, as when she throws away an invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa, believing it to be a "scam." Only the intervention of an eagle-eyed friend, who saw the letter in the trash, saved the day.
Sotomayor goes to considerable lengths to say she is not "self-made." She candidly describes her struggles and failures, starting with how she learned to study in middle school: She asked the girl who got the most gold stars. But it soon becomes clear that while she needed help from lots of people to succeed, her own devotion to work and discipline have been the mainstays of her life.
At Princeton, she quickly realized she was deficient in English and in writing skills, prompting her to design for herself a crash course in writing and reading the classics. It was not the first time she would fall on her face but pick herself up and work like a demon to improve. In her first legal job, as a summer associate in a big New York firm, she failed miserably. After law school she describes her beginning panics as a "duckling" handling misdemeanors in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and how she transformed herself into a top felony prosecutor. After four years, though, she decided to leave, fearing she was losing her humanity. "I could see the signs that I too was hardening, and I didn't like what I saw. Even my sympathy for the victims, once such an inexhaustible driver of my efforts, was being depleted by the daily spectacle of misdeeds and misery."
She is similarly candid in describing her marriage and divorce.
Sotomayor writes with a sense of humor. Describing her post-divorce life, she observes wryly, "Probably nothing constrained my dating life as much as living at home with my mother. To hear her screaming from the bedroom, 'Sonia, it's midnight. You have to work tomorrow!' did not exactly make me feel like Mary Tyler Moore. "
For the reader, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Sotomayor personality turns out to be the way she confronts her fears and failures. She doesn't do well in a course, so she enrolls in a harder one on the same subject. She is afraid of swimming, so she takes swimming lessons and becomes a regular in the pool. She is a clumsy klutz, so she decides to soothe the heartache of a failed romance by taking Salsa lessons and learns to dance. Even her looks and clothes — something she always claimed to have no interest in because she couldn't compete with her stylish mother — she eventually learns to deal with. She takes shopping lessons from a friend and gets her own style.
In the forward to her book, Sotomayor writes: "I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability. I will be judged as a human being by what readers find here. There are hazards to openness, but they seem minor compared with the possibility that some readers may find comfort, perhaps even inspiration, from a close examination of how an ordinary person, with strengths and weaknesses like anyone else, has managed an extraordinary journey."
It is an apt observation, except that after reading the book, few will think she is ordinary.