Photo: Maria Esquinca
|
ORDINARY GIRLS
“A powerful memoir, heart-wrenching, inspiring, thoroughly engrossing, reminiscent of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and more recently Tara Westover’s Educated. Through one family’s story, we learn about challenges of poverty, migration, uprootedness, addiction, sexism, racism--but also about the triumphant, spirited storyteller who survives to tell the tale. Jaquira Díaz is our contemporary Scheherazade, telling stories to keep herself alive and whole, and us her readers mesmerized and wanting more. And we get it: there is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies |
Acclaimed essayist Jaquira Díaz writes an unflinching account of growing up in Puerto Rico and Miami as a queer, biracial girl searching for home as her family splits apart and her mother struggles with mental illness and addiction. As Díaz tells the story of her own struggles with depression and drug abuse and her experiences of violence woven in with Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page vibrates with music and lyricism. Ordinary Girls is a fiercely passionate, groundbreaking memoir about girlhood in a dangerous world, about how we’re not defined by the worst things we’ve ever done, and about surviving, even as we’re losing the people we love.
“Jaquira Díaz' Ordinary Girls is a life story of astonishing honesty and beauty and power, a memoir of breath and rhythm and blood-red struggle, a book for everyone who has ever felt homesick inside their own skin, and for those who, like Díaz, sing the marvelous song of themselves at top volume.”
—Karen Russell, author of Orange World
“Jaquira Díaz writes about ordinary girls living extraordinary lives. And Díaz is no ordinary observer. She is a wondrous survivor, a woman who has claimed her own voice, a writer who writes for those who have no voice, for the black and brown girls “who never saw themselves in books.” Jaquira Díaz writes about them with love. How extraordinary is that!”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
“Jaquira Díaz is an unstoppable force. Her writing is alive with power. I stand in awe of what she brings us. The future is here.”
--Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
“Jaquira Díaz' Ordinary Girls is a life story of astonishing honesty and beauty and power, a memoir of breath and rhythm and blood-red struggle, a book for everyone who has ever felt homesick inside their own skin, and for those who, like Díaz, sing the marvelous song of themselves at top volume.”
—Karen Russell, author of Orange World
“Jaquira Díaz writes about ordinary girls living extraordinary lives. And Díaz is no ordinary observer. She is a wondrous survivor, a woman who has claimed her own voice, a writer who writes for those who have no voice, for the black and brown girls “who never saw themselves in books.” Jaquira Díaz writes about them with love. How extraordinary is that!”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
“Jaquira Díaz is an unstoppable force. Her writing is alive with power. I stand in awe of what she brings us. The future is here.”
--Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
|
|
|
|
|