An intriguing but strangely unreflective memoir.
Peralta, a Mexican woman now living in Southern California, surveys her romantic past and her struggle to understand herself as a bisexual in this memoir.
Growing up in midcentury Mexico, Peralta was told that sexual desire was dirty. Her love for dancing and applause earned censure, too: “Only lower-class women go into show business,” her mother said. She was even criticized for dancing too close to a boy in a socially approved setting in an event hall. “By now I should know that feeling pleasure in my body is wrong,” a 16-year-old Marina concluded. But if desire for boys was wrong, desire for a woman was worse, according to Peralta’s mother. She told her 18-year-old daughter that “[i]t is better to be a whore than a lesbian,” after she found some love notes a woman wrote to Marina. Over the next decades, the author grew up, had a family, started a dance school, got divorced, had lesbian affairs, became a therapist, and moved back and forth between Mexico and the United States. Throughout this memoir, Peralta traces her growing self-understanding as a woman attracted to both men and women. Her story is particularly valuable for readers who wish to understand the social and familial forces that were arrayed against gays and lesbians in the past. But, overall, the memoir often comes off as more emotional than thoughtful about the events of Peralta’s own life. On the breakup of her marriage, for example, the author writes: “I never considered the aftermath of a divorce….I didn’t expect to grieve over my broken marriage or have regrets for the breakup.” The memoir also doesn’t delve very deeply into other people’s experiences—although a final section about the author’s mother does make an effort in that direction.
An intriguing but strangely unreflective memoir.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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