Bold, raw, and courageous.
An award-winning TV actress and her trans sister tell the story of how they learned to navigate the difficult, often troubled waters of gender transition.
A year after Selenis’ mother and father became foster parents, they took in—and later adopted—a child named Jose. Immediately, Selenis noticed he was different. As a baby, “his cry was desperate,” as though he was already “struggl[ing] with his existence.” In a three-part narrative that moves between Selenis and her adopted sibling, the pair offer an intimate, often moving account of their journey toward loving acceptance of each other. Part I deals with the years before that sibling's transition into Marizol. Using masculine pronouns and Marizol’s male deadname, Selenis recalls how Jose loved to play with hair and makeup. Despite Selenis’ support, he still faced pressure from his adopted family to conform to a masculine gender identity. Seeking answers and support from social media and elsewhere, Jose first identified as gay before coming out to Selenis. But a question she posed—“did [he] want to be a woman?”—catapulted Jose into the period of transition and self-acceptance, which the authors cover in parts II and III. Moving beyond the confines of his Bronx Latinx community, contact with other trans individuals proved liberating. However, transitioning into Marizol meant facing often painful, sometimes dangerous circumstances. In and out of Selenis’ life, Marizol turned to sex work to support herself and later experienced abuse at the hands of a sadistic boyfriend. Meanwhile, Selenis’ work as a TV actress (most notably on Orange Is the New Black) brought her into contact with trans actor and activist Laverne Cox, who helped her better understand Marizol’s struggles. Determined to help her sister, Selenis brought her sister to a New York LGBTQ center where Marizol could safely come into her own. Fiercely honest, this book not only chronicles a harrowing journey to self-acceptance; it also celebrates an interpersonal love that transcends the bounds of blood and family.<
Bold, raw, and courageous.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6295-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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