Review 108: Ordinary Girls

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a surprising book. A memoir of growing up in Peurto Rico and Miami Beach, in an extremely dysfunctional family. Díaz’s mother and maternal grandmother both have mental illness and drug addiction. Her father seems more concerned with chasing other women, or something. It is her father’s mother that saves Díaz, her abuela. The book is lyrical and written well, in many ways amazing.

How do you survive poverty? How do you survive drug addicted mother, parents that split up? How do you survive a childhood where the mother is the child’s worst danger? Where babies are found dead, brutalized and starved, left in bushes by an uncaring mother and her lesbian lover. How do you claim your sexuality when you’re attacked by a child even?

Díaz is a strong writer. The book is not linear, and perhaps if the book was told that way it would be overwhelming. It was for Díaz in living her life, and at the end we, as well as Díaz are amazed she did survive. Not only survive, but thrive.

An amazing book, not an easy read, it is intense. It is also very much worth reading.



Thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book.