Tagged with fiction

This time the lesbian teen is a different type of orthodox: Cuban-American from Miami. Laura gets busted with a love note from her girlfriend the last day of junior year and gets kicked out of her house for being a degenerada. Luckily she's got a best friend with and understanding mima who take her in. The book is Laura's journey out of the closet. I found it a little too much, like the author was trying to hard to pack everything in, and the cover reminds me of what they did to Leilaina's film in Reality Bites, turning it from a thoughtful documentary about lost youth into an MTV high concept/low content pre-reality show reality show. That's just the cover and crazy fontage I'm vilifying. The story is fine, but one of those YA novels that is better left to its intended audience instead of middle-aged ladies like me. It has plenty going for it: transgender and genderqueer characters, Cuban Spanish idioms, sexy round chicks, and standing up to homophobic bullies.

You know how I'm always complaining about stories told in multiple voices? (They should come with a warning on the cover!) Well this is another one. Maybe because they take turns so frequently in this book that you don't get attached, it isn't as much of a problem as usual. Still, maybe because I didn't get attached to any of the characters, it feels the whole time like you're waiting for the book to happen. The connecting stories are compelling enough, but what's really interesting is the look at life in Kuwait. I don't know much about the country, other than remembering learning how rich it is. In elementary school we didn't talk about how you can't be rich without having poor people take care of you. In Kuwait, all Kuwaitis (not including Kuwait-born Palestinians) are pretty well off, which means they have to import their servants and even many of their professionals. Most of the characters in the book are American, Filipino, Indian, or Palestinian, rather than Kuwaiti. It takes a lot of non-rich people to take care of the rich people, I guess.

Instead of reviewing the latest book in the Sookie Stackhouse series, I prefer to gossip about it. Beware of spoilers.

I'd read DTWOF here and there, mostly on the interweb, like especially when the main character, Mo, decided to go to library school in 2001, and the link to that strip got forwarded around the bibliosphere like crazy. But without regular exposure, I had not realized just how brilliant the biweekly comic strip is. I can't believe (okay, I can believe but don't want to) that it isn't syndicated in every newspaper that carries Doonesbury, or at least Boondocks. I'm guessing it's the title? Which is unfortunate also because this comic is relevant to all people with radical left politics. Maybe even liberals!