Undiagnosed paranoia and depression
Beka is only 14 when her best friend dies. It isn't like that's the only thing wrong either—it's 1950-something in Belize, and political change is keeping everyone around her paranoid. Her parents work hard to support her, but she has a hard time understanding why life has to be so difficult for their family all the time. She has a hard time motivating.
These are thematic ways of alerting the reader to an that Beka doesn't notice yet in herself—mental health crisis. When her parents get in a nasty fight with her, they think she is just being lazy and selfish, but she's really struggling to stay healthy and happy, and without any serious conversations about mental health, she is forced to suffer quietly, finding peace where she can. She is "misunderstood."
Disenfranchisement
For Beka's parents, only one goal is important: for Beka to have a good life with less difficulty than theirs. But when her friend dies, that's simply not an option for her. She has to mourn, but that makes her disinterested in school. Her parents believe education will bring her success, but they don't explain things to her, and then when she fails, they hold it against her.
This is a social criticism about pedagogy. When people treat their students or kids like failures are rooted in character flaws, the children are disenfranchised, and to be slandered by a parent is traumatizing to anyone. When Beka thinks about school, all she can feel is the anger and paranoia from having to live up to her parent's view of success.
Emotional desperation
Although the parents think Beka is just being a rebel when she steals their money, fails out of private school, and starts acting out, but that's because they are completely unwilling to communicate with her as a real person. They treat her in a way that doesn't make sense, as if they didn't notice that she became an individual with her own life and point of view.
When she deals with trauma and heartache and pain and paranoia and extreme panic, her parents just ignore those signs. This is the book's way of telling the reader to consider that perhaps when people are acting crazy, that's because they're in severe emotional pain and perhaps they just need to be understood.
Political State
Almost throughout the novel the political state of Belize was often mentioned. Especially when Beka loved to look at the past. It also proven with the struggle of Toycie being sent to get an education is a result of poverty in Belize.
