Tagged with female

I’ve never read a book that took place in Uruguay before. All I knew about it is that Uruguayos have my favorite Spanish accent. It’s like Argentina’s Italian slanted castellano, but softer. Unfortunately Uruguayan dissidents didn’t have a much softer time of it than their compañeros across the Rio de la Plata in the 1970s.

May-lee Chai exposes the racist heartlessness of the heartland in her memoir of spending her teens in South Dakota (near the Pine Ridge reservation where someone perhaps other than Leonard Peltier shot two FBI agents a few years before the Chais moved there). She and her brother faced real danger from their fellow junior high and high school students, and several of the family’s dogs were killed on the Chai’s farm.

Holy fuck another potentially huge teen novel series by a Mormon author!

It sucks to be a fundamentalist Mormon if you’re not a future God of your own universe (i.e. a man with multiple wives and children, preferably with some prominence in the community). It sucks especially bad if you’re a pretty girl about to be married off to the highest bidder. This angry and compelling, if not especially sophisticated, novel takes on the injustice and cruelty of polygamy as practiced by fundamentalist Mormons. You know what you’re in for with the dedication, “To all the victims of polygamy.”