Ordinary Girls

May 1, 2019

A two-time Pushcart Prize winner whose work has appeared in The Best American Essays, Díaz here tells the wrenching story of growing up queer and biracial in Puerto Rico and Miami and her struggle to find a place for herself as her family splinters apart and her mother succumbs to mental illness and addiction. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 24, 2019
Díaz’s strong debut memoir charts her poor, violent childhood in Puerto Rico and Miami and her bumpy transition from girlhood to womanhood. The book opens in 1985 in Puerto Rico, where Díaz’s father, Papi, was a drug dealer and her mother, Mami, was an erratic personality who’d soon be in the grips of schizophrenia. Within a few years the family moved to Miami Beach, in pursuit of better opportunities. Díaz recalls that her parents were constantly fighting and uprooting her and her two siblings: “every new apartment would be smaller than the last.” She writes about being a juvenile delinquent and “a closeted queer girl in a homophobic place,” taking drugs, running away, getting married at 17, and being sexually assaulted. Her most gripping stories concern the women in her life: her angry maternal grandmother, who mocked her appearance; her paternal grandmother, who brought her joy and relief; and her mother, a “shattered creature” whom she watched descend into mental illness and addiction. A turning point for Díaz comes toward the end of the book, when Díaz details how enlisting in the Navy at 18 gave her the stability she needed. Díaz’s empowering book wonderfully portrays the female struggle and the patterns of family dysfunction.

September 1, 2019
An "ordinary girl" rebels against her unstable life in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach until military service helps her gain a life-altering self-confidence. Growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico, Díaz (editor: 15 Views of Miami, 2014) tossed aside the blonde-haired Barbie dolls her elders gave her. "They always made me feel ugly, the brown kid who would never look like her white mother," she writes in her inventive debut memoir. It didn't help that her philandering father sold drugs, her mother showed alarming signs of her soon-to-be-diagnosed schizophrenia, and only her loving grandmother provided a stable presence in her life and those of her two siblings. Hoping for better, her father moved the family to Miami Beach when Díaz was in elementary school. But the money ran out, and the family was evicted repeatedly from shabby apartments. As "a closeted queer girl in a homophobic place," the author couldn't adjust, kept getting arrested, and ended up in Narcotics Anonymous and a juvenile detention center. Depressed and desperate to end the free fall, she dropped out of high school at 16, married at 17, and made a life-changing move at 18, enlisting in the U.S. Navy. As she aced military tests, her faith in herself grew and led eventually to a graduate degree and a literary career that has earned her two Pushcart Prizes. Using flashbacks, shifts in tense, and other novelistic devices, Díaz weaves impressionistic vignettes about Puerto Rican history and culture into her story, which begins when she watches an activist's funeral procession in Puerto Rico in 1985 and ends after a recent visit to the island in the wake of Hurricane María. Along the way, she withholds key dates and other facts that would have made it easier to put some events in context. However, the literary bells and whistles give her story a broader interest than many memoirs that are more solipsistic. This book isn't just about the author's quest for self-determination; it's also about Puerto Rico's. An unusually creative memoir of a bicultural life.

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September 1, 2019
Accomplished writer and storyteller D�az recollects the remarkable and violent moments that shaped her life in this candid and compelling memoir. The narrative begins in her native Puerto Rico, where she was a child being introduced to the literary and political greats of Boricua culture, and culminates in the present when she is a professor and writer. D�az shares her journey of survival without embellishment and is unabashed about the lurid and painful details of her existence, including sexual and physical assaults, drug abuse, bouts of homelessness, and stints in juvenile detention centers. D�az's strength lies in how she can enliven the places she inhabits, from the seedy Miami streets she roams to sordid spaces she occupies. Her skillful weaving-in of several harrowing deaths that made national headlines, including the Casey Anthony case and the "Baby Lolliipops Murder," illuminates some eerie similarities and connections to her life. While the story of a typical displaced girl's life could have been tragic, D�az takes charge, changes her trajectory, and tells a tale of an individual who ultimately triumphs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)