Marci Cruz has an abusive father, a mother who is blinded by love for her husband, and wants to be a boy so she can love girls. The story can be hard to read sometimes because Eddie Cruz really is a champion cabrón (there's a ton of Spanish in the book), but seeing 11-year-old Marci and her seven-year-old sister Corin fight back is satisfying.
Like with First Spring Grass Fire, you wonder of Someday, Someday, Maybe how much of the story of a young aspiring actor in NYC written by a former young aspiring actor in NYC is autobiographical. While reading it I was thinking that it's possible that fictionalizing one's life might make it easier to tell the emotional truth.
I grasp onto the nearby silver pole, steadying myself as the train lurches along, my hand slipping on the smooth surface, vying for a safe position along with half a dozen other hands. Today, everything about New York leaves me feeling like I'm competing for space, and just barely hanging on.
Spoon's book is listed as a novel but reads like a memoir, told in nonlinear episodes with the protagonist sharing the author's name. I suppose I shouldn't care about the distinction, but I can't help wanting to know what I'm reading. Regardless, one should treasure the rare opportunity to read about the real or fictionalized life of a genderqueer child growing up in a religious family in the Canadian prairies.
Here's a twofer: highlights from the March 2013 SACO editorial meeting and new LCSH from March 2013.
[SACOLIST] Summary of Decisions, Editorial Meeting 13/03, March 18, 2013
Preview: Chaotic synchronization is now a SACO approved thing!
With Caroline Paul laid up after an accident and a new girlfriend on the scene, one of her cats goes missing. The cat comes back, but perhaps being bored from lying around the house, or maybe because she's just like that, Paul wants to know where the cat, Tibby, went and who took care of him while he was gone.
Chicana butch Karleen Pendleton Jiménez has known she wanted to have a baby almost as long as she has known she wasn't a girly girl. Having other things going on in her twenties and no chance of getting pregnant accidentally, she doesn't get around to trying to get knocked up until her mid-30s, which is not typically easy for lesbians in the best of times.
I don't always love compilation zines, and I don't often read zines by cisgender men, but I do love romantic comedies, so chances were 2 to 1 against my being a fan of I Love Bad Movies: Love, Sex, & Friendship. Since I'm writing about it, you can guess that I did, in fact, become enamored of the zine.
I have long enjoyed Julia Alvarez's reality inspired political fiction, I gobble up autobiographies, and because of my spouse's work with two nonprofits there, I have an interest in Haiti, so of course her Haiti memoir was appealing to me. Unfortunately...
"We ride into the downtown area [of Port-au-Prince], full of ambivalence. To watch or not to watch. What is the respectful way to move through these scenes of devastation? We came to see, and according to Junior, Haiti needs to be seen. But something feels unsavory about visiting sites where people have suffered and are still suffering. You tell yourself you are here in solidarity. But at the end of the day, you add it up, and you still feel ashamed--at least I do. You haven't improved a damn thing. Natural disaster tourism--that's what it feels like."
When Gloria, a 16-year-old Ghanaian, more or less flunks junior high school a friend of the family arranges for her to become a nanny for a doctor with a two-year-old son. Stuff does happen in this novel--good things and fair amount of bad things, but it mostly feels like a character development story.
