Tagged with female

A.j.’s consumption zine this year contains short reviews of what she read, saw, and listened to, but details what she anti-consumed, i.e. gave away. A girl with a library degree, and a case of packratitude, she purged her book collection. Because she is a big old library geek, not to mention a comics geek and exhibits several other flavors of geekish predilections, she provides a helpful methodology for ridding herself of her books.

So you don’t think I’m completely cold-hearted after reading the majority of my recent teen fiction reviews, A Time for Dancing really got me. I was drawn to it because it appeared to be about dancers, and while that’s kind of true, the dancing part wasn’t what I was hoping for. I was pretty much sucked in by the sob story, told in the voices of a pair of best friends, navigating cancer. Both points of view are credible and moving.

This is a book club book, so I don’t want to say much about it before I get the chance to talk about it with Celia. And that’s fine, because I don’t have a ton to say about it. A young goth punk alcoholic in recovery, whose father died a few years prior discovers Debbie Harry, falls in love, and realizes he’s a transvestite. It’s an area that’s not covered adequately in the literature, but I’m not sure it’s covered adequately here, either.

This is a fast, enjoyable read, and gives you an idea of what life is like for women in Afghanistan. Ms. Rodriguez is a likable if not always reliable narrator. As she says herself, "Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing much good here. There are many of us Westerners who want to help Afghan women, but our efforts don't always help them in the ways that we hope they will. ... It takes a long time to understand how the complexities of these women's lives differ from the complexities of ours." (p.259)