As someone who grew up in a "normal" family (2 kids, house in the suburbs), and who is now the father in a "normal" family (2 kids, house in a different suburb), I always bristle at the unchallenged assumption in a lot of stories that "normal" families are boring, or pointless, or somehow lesser than the cool alternative that the story is about to celebrate.
So this story was really awesome because it tackled that tension between normal-white-bread-suburban and cool-and-free-and-different head on. Our narrator had an overly simple view of the world, and she was not entirely trustworthy. As we saw near the end, she was greatly underestimating her Mom's ability to understand her. And we also got to see the good and the bad and the complexity of Ana Celina and her mother and their life.
Basically, one of the things teenagers have to learn as they come of age is that people and reality is not as simple as a dichotomy between lame and not-lame. The world and the people in it are complex and all come with a mix of good, and bad, and lame, and cool. And this story explores that.
I liked it a lot.