This is such a book of pain. There is happiness and hope, but so much pain. While Jaquira lays out the moments of her life, jumping back and forth between her childhood and adulthood, you just gain a sense of shock that she kept surviving. There doesn't seem to be a point where she was given a moment to breathe throughout her whole life, but she kept going and survived. It was beautiful and broken.

This was an interesting read I received from the publisher. I felt as if my emotion had been crushed by a truck but this was all absolutely worth it!

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read and review this book. While this title is no longer within the realm of my current reading interests I appreciate the opportunity in receiving an ARC.

Unfortunately, I did not even start Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz. It was archived before I was able to get back to it. It may been a timing issue. As we all know, it has to be the right book at the right time.

**I received an electronic ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review of this book.

"And if I could reach back through time and space to that girl I was, to all my girls, I would tell you to take care, to love each other, fight less, dance dance dance until you're breathless. And goddamn, girl. Live."

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz was anything but ordinary. Jaquira experiences more than any child and adult ever should. Growing up in Miami and Puerto Rico, this was a heartbreaking yet hopeful coming-of-age memoir.

This book is a memoir about Jaquira Diaz’s childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach. her story is one of survival, violence, and trauma.

Jaquira told us about the life she lives, the beatings and abuse, and especially of the neglect. This young woman is a user of drugs and alcohol and she is left to run the streets at all hours with her group of girlfriends. She is repeatedly in trouble with the law and juvenile court.

Jaquira’s life was full of sexual violence, drug, alcohol, abuse, a mentally ill mother, an absent father and arrest but Jaquira is a survivor, there is no doubt about that and she is telling us her story.

Jaquira’s have a loyal group of friends, the ordinary girls, she can count on them and they helped her to get through the day when she couldn’t do it on her own.

I find this book nice, she will make it out of this life, but sadly Jaquira doesn’t tell us much about how she make it. Jaquira Diaz is a very strong woman who take her own life in her own hand and she did it, She get out of the street, she is a great woman and she tells us her story with so much force.

"Some girls grow up to be the kind of women who fall for men like their fathers. Some girls grow up to be just like them"
-Jaquira Diaz

Ordinary Girls is a gut wrenching memoir from Jaquira Diaz. Growing up in Puerto Rico in poverty, along with a schizophrenic mother, drug dealer father, and a sick brother was no easy feat. She knows what it's like to struggle and be lost without a way. As a young girl she spent her time in the streets hanging out with the wild crowd, and getting into trouble. She had no-one that cared for her or her well being, except for her grandmother, but even with that she couldn't completely trust that she would always be there for her. Half the time her mother prostituted herself for her guilty pleasures.

Jaquira and her family moved to Miami to see if being in a different area would somehow make life a bit better, but life was just the same if not worse. Consistently moving around, Jaquira turned alcohol, sex, drugs, and other things that were normal in her life. She also was in and out of jail. Her life was bound to stay a continuous disaster if things didn't change quickly. Diaz felt lost without no support. School was never her forte either so she didn't even have that either. So how did a young girl with such a horrible life make it to her passion as a writer? You have to find out for yourself.

This was such a great memoir. I'm so glad Diaz was able to take some control of her life and used it towards her writing. Huge thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin books for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

@algonquinbooks is kind to send a galley my way and this memoir is a raw and riveting tale that tackled story about family, friendship, and being an ordinary girl in an extra challenging world. The author carefully narrated a world while highlighting the vulnerabilities of being a mother in an unstable life and also presenting a picture about broken family, substance abuse, sexual assault, mental illness, suicide and violence.

Synopsis of ORDINARY GIRLS:

In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age.

While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn't find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.

Reminiscent of Tara Westover's Educated, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz's memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history-and reads as electrically as a novel.

As one of my first ever memoirs I loved this! Diaz's debut memoir is told in a colourful and heart achingly factual way as she lays out the hardships of her life. From her point of view we learn what life was like growing up in Puerto Rico and Miami, amidst a separating family and plenty of violence. Be warned, this is not a light hearted read. Diaz talks about her experiences with depression, sexual assault, growing up with violence on your doorstep and murdered toddlers like it was the normal thing to see as a child. Pretty much every trigger warning you can think of, pops up in here somehow. I often found myself having to pause every thirty pages just to let everything sink in and remind myself that this wasn't a hard hitting contemporary. All in all it was just a super eye opening read which I am so so happy to have read!

Ordinary Girls is a book for Puerto Rican girls, for Miami girls, for queer girls, for wild girls, for fierce girls, for girls who were saved by books, for girls who have been victims of crime and violence, for homeless girls, for girls living in poverty, for girls struggling with addiction, for girls with parents struggling with addiction, for girls who have people they love living with serious and persistent mental illness, for girls who fight, for girls who pave their own paths, for girls with friends who become family.

And if you are none of the above, Ordinary Girls is a breathtaking memoir that will teach you empathy for those who are.

Ordinary Girls is about sisterhood – and about surviving.

This expansive memoir follows Jaquira's experience from her early childhood in Puerto Rico, through her really troubled teenage experiences in Miami, and on through her life beyond.

Jaquira doesn't ever identify her sexuality in certain terms, but it's clear that she's queer; she often talks about painful crushes on childhood friends. She describes sex with a woman as the first time she ever felt real. But that's not what this story is about. Or her identity as a Black Latina / mixed race woman. But I will say that her intersecting identities made this a very appropriate choice to read this June.

The book delves into modern colonialism and Puerto Rican independence. Police violence. And the ongoing murders of Black and Brown people at the hands of the heterociswhite patriarchy and the police and politicians that have weaponized it.

Jaquira's childhood is marred with ugly, painful experiences, from her mother's drug addition and schizophrenia, to her brother's physical abuse, to repeated sexual assaults, to her own grandmother's racism toward Jaquira's visible Blackness.

There's no denying that Jaquira had a painful, tough childhood, but it struck me over and again how true the title is.

Ordinary.

Ordinary girls nurse silent crushes on their friends. Ordinary girls flirt, flexing the remarkable magic of their young charm. Ordinary girls are assaulted. Ordinary girls are loathed for the big and small ways that they are different. Ordinary girls obsesses over dead children. Ordinary girls turn dark and tough in adolescence, tiptoing along a knife-edge between self-discovery and self-endangerment. Ordinary girls attempt suicide.

Ordinary girls barely survive adolescence; some of them don't make it at all.

As different as her life is from mine, I was constantly struck by how strongly her experiences resonated with me. How similar our girlhoods truly were. And how remarkable it is that she – that any of us – survived to look back on this story.

I don't normally read memoir, but this was a book that I could not put down. From Jaquira's beautiful voice or her warm humour to the fierce love she has for friends, I found this to be compelling and beautiful, and sometimes maddening. I've already recommended to a handful of friends.

This was a memoir that is important for yesterday, today, and the future. We can learn so much from Diaz's story. She candidly goes through her life in poverty, abuse, and mental health struggles for herself and her family. The story is relevant today, still. There is so much sadness and truth here.

A story about a girl growing up in Puerto Rico and Miami, FL. The heartache, pain, sexism, depression that the author went was tough. But she came out on the other side a strong woman. I had one main issue with this book, one the story is being good told through memories. But this felt very disjointed in that she never gave a day, or a time of the year for each memory. As soon as she finished one memory, she would start another memory. Again without a sense of time of when it happened. But keep in mind that this story is told through the memories of a child. This was a very good book, I got to experience Puerto Rico and learn about it's history. Thank you to @netgalley @algonquinbooks @jaquiradiaz for my copy

This is one that I will definitely recommend to others. I think that the life told is one that many to need to read, feel and attempt to understand. This memoir is one that should bring out empathy in anyone with a heart.

"Yo estoy sola," Lolita said, but what she really meant was I am a woman.

I am glad that this blog tour happened in this period so full of changes (hopefully) and revolutions.
I recon it's very consistent with some of the most interesting parts of this memoir, which are the ones about the colonial history of Puerto Rico and the revolutions, deaths and violence that characterize it. Thanks to this memoir I learned a part of history that is hardly taught in school.
Furthermore, the life lived by Jaquira Díaz and by the people around her is definitely the opposite of what I have lived up 'till now and it is always positive to be reminded that in the world we are not all the same and that our life experiences differ in abysmal ways.
In this biography, Jaquira Díaz speaks without half measures and censorship of her life, and I think that it had taken her immense courage to do so. Her story is not at all happy or easy, it is one of those stories that don't sit well on your stomach, but that passes a great message of redemption and courage.
The author also talks about other women, some of whom were accused of terrible crimes and certainly does not sugarcoat it.
Everything reported in this memoir, from the historical events in Puerto Rico to the crime news of those years, are part of the difficult story of the author and increase its emotional and abrasive charge.

I'll surely keep an eye on Jaquira Díaz because she's a great writer and has plenty to say.

I have received this ARC from Algonquin Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Ordinary girls By Jaquira Diaz is a powerfully tragic memoir that follows the life and tough upbringing of Jaquira through living in Puerto Rico and trying to make a life in Miami.

this memoir is a very sad and upsetting book with Jaquira finding herself in some very harmful situations with family and friends and some of the bad choices that the author had made growing up. but one day Jaquira decided it was time to make a life for herself outside of Puerto Rico and move to Miami Beach and move away from the violence, drugs and crime.

this book definitely deals with an had a lot of trigger warnings involved with sexual assault, a mother with schizophrenia, and depression. I would say if you want to read this memoir definitely make sure you know you will be okay and feel fine reading this one

I really do not know where to start with my review, because this book really left me all over the place. I’m just still so stunned and left thinking about it, thinking about how this is not a fiction novel, but a memoir, a retelling of someone’s life. So, let me tell you what it’s about first:

This memoir is about Jaquira Díaz, about her growing up in Puerto Rico with her two siblings and her always fighting parents, her dad a part-time drug dealer and her mom starting to battle schizophrenia and becoming a drug addict. They move to Miami to try to have a better life, which doesn’t really turn out that great. Díaz parents get divorced, her mom’s illness worsens, and Díaz can be found partying with older guys, smoking, doing drugs, and then dropping out of high school. This is a brutally honest book which holds so much life in it that it was hard for me to put down, but also sometimes hard to read because I needed some time to process everything I’ve read.

It's such an honest book. It talks about all of Díaz’s struggels, the mental ones (depression), the physical ones (sexual assault and drug use) as well as the systemic ones (poverty, racism and sexism). There is so much happening in this book, which gives this book so much life! At times I felt like my life is so tiny, privileged and actually ordinary compared to hers, and her having already experienced and done more by the age of 13 than me in my entire 19 years of life and counting. Even though it being so packed full with stories of her youth and her growing up, not one of the events described feel false. Reading this book always felt like it was 100% honesty, that there is absolutely no sugarcoating, not in her family situation or in the times that she’s sexually assaulted.

The title is also misleading and ironic, because as you might have noticed, Jaquira Díaz is not your Ordinary Girl. Or maybe not to the people who normally read memoirs. She brings up the words “Ordinary Girls” several times throughout the book, making you notice that the word is actually implied to mean the opposite, Unordinary Girls.

The book has constant flashbacks, going from the present to the past and to the future. It as well has several passages that talk about the case of “Baby Lollipops”, a baby that was found dead in Miami when Díaz was a child and got an obsession with.

I really liked the writing of this book, it was so wonderfully written! Which is weird to say, because the themes and topics that are written about are not. When I’d have to lay the book down because the contents of it were hitting me a bit too hard, it would be the writing that would bring me back to reading it a second after, just because I like the writing style so much. It made the book complete, gave it a different tone, because I think otherwise reading this book would have been harder for me. I also really liked the Spanish words and phrases sprinkled along the pages, but in the beginning I found them a bit distracting and too much. Knowing Spanish, I appreciated them and liked them a lot, but then thinking about Non-Spanish speakers I think that they could be very distracting and after a while also very annoying, as there are no translations given.

The only little downside I had with this book was the last quarter of the it, when Díaz is an adult and trying to get her life together after her wild youth. Reading those parts of her story felt different than the teenage ones, maybe because the wounds and stories were still too fresh, and not yet as worked through as her teenage years. It felt a bit distracting, the depth in the words was lacking and felt more shallow. There were also many empty time slots which were cured with a fast forward. This made me feel like those passages are a bit blotchy, that maybe there was not really a lot to tell, or that there are still some parts that are hidden and not to be published.

All in all I really enjoyed reading this book, and was happy to read my first memoir!! (And that it was such a good one as well!) It was just packed with life, honesty and love, and it was just so hard to put down! The writing was wonderful and always a pleasure to read. So if I made you curious, please give this book a go, it really is worth it and you’ll not regret it!
The paperback edition of this book came out only a few days ago, on the 16th of June!! Having received a free copy of this book does not alter my opinion in any way.

This book shows the full story of a girl who through fight finally becomes someone she always wanted to be. It’s a long way she had to go through with many hurtful events in the middle, but it all led her to where she is now.

Jaquira Díaz’s life can be described in many ways. From the early years, she had to take care of herself but also her mother and little sister. She had to grow up very fast and the consequences of it appeared very early. Her life was very hard, for most of the time she lived with her mother who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts more than once and drowning her sorrows in alcohol daily. The constant parting and meeting people of the streets also discovered her to dangerous situations like multiple sexual assaults. These scenes described in the book were honestly very painful to read. Especially considering the young age of the author, when her first time wasn’t her choice, and saying no wasn’t an option. When I was reading this book, I realized how much my childhood differed from hers and how lucky I was to be born into a family like mine with a stable life and loving parents. That’s a privilege people don’t recognize in their lives.

Ordinary Girls are touching aspects people don’t like to talk about. They are considered shameful or uncomfortable. It’s also shown in the book when young girls are keeping the secrets about being sexually harassed to themselves instead of going to the police or someone trustworthy. They think they deserved it or that no one will even believe them. So, they go on with their life, drink, even more, drop the school and live on the streets with people like them.

Reading this book was very painful, especially that I knew that it’s all based on the author’s life. I couldn’t even imagine going through all of this and sharing it all with people. I’m sure it had to be a long and hard process to go through. However, I know that this book would connect girls like her and send them the message that they are not alone. Moreover, it is eyes opening, it’s teaches people that they shouldn’t judge people without knowing their story and life situation. We see young homeless people and think all wrong about them, but the truth may be completely different.

This book shows the full story of a girl who through fight finally becomes someone she always wanted to be. It’s a long way she had to go through with many hurtful events in the middle, but it all led her to where she is now.

For the story and quality of the book and writing, I would give this book five stars. However, I felt confused so many times while reading this book because I was jumping through the years and events. I know that it was done on purpose, but I didn’t like it. I had to go back to see which situation was this year connected and how old she was. I think it would be much better if the events would happen in chronological order.

I would like to thank Algonquin Books and Jaquira Díaz for inviting me to be a part of this amazing blog tour and for providing me with such an inspiring book.

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz was a heartfelt, heartbreaking and yet hopeful memoir about Diaz’s life growing up in poverty, and living in the projects of Puerto Rico and Miami Beach.

Diaz told her story with unflinching bravery and honesty about her harrowing childhood, surviving the harsh streets, and with a mother suffering from mental illness. With the odds against her, she rose from all these and utilized her talents through her writing and pursuit of education to achieve the impossible.

Her story is about resilience, survival and the strength to overcome when the life handed to you is set up for failure. In this memoir Diaz’s triumph becomes our triumph as we get to examine this extraordinary life we are privy to.

Brava to this powerful and Insightful memoir I highly recommend!

TW: Death of a child, death of a parent, sex, smoking, drug use, imprisoned, murder, poverty, mention of teenage pregnancy, sexual assault, addiction, suicide attempts, suicidal, depression, loneliness, breakup
Rep: Queer Biracial Afro-Latinx MC, Afro-Latinx side characters

"For the girls they were, for the girl I was, for girls everywhere who are just like we used to be. For the black and brown girls. For the girls on the merry-go-round making the world spin. For the wild girls and the party girls, the loudmouths and troublemakers. For the girls who are angry and lost. For the girls who never saw themselves in books. For the girls who love other girls, sometimes in secret. For the girls who believe in monsters. For the girls on the edge who are ready to fly. For the ordinary girls. For all the girls who broke my heart. And their mothers. And their daughters. And if I could reach back through time and space to that girl I was, to all my girls, I would tell you to take care, to love each other, fight less, dance dance dance until you're breathless. And goddamn, girl. Love."

I wasn't sure what to expect, minus the fact that I did not know this was queer whatsoever until I looked it up, and read the book last minute, which is why this post is hours late than it should be. It took me a while to read mostly because my tablet was dead and it takes me forever to eat still, but hey at least, my lock jaw is no more pretty much.

Memoirs are usually not my thing, but honestly this memoir was really interesting. It's about Jaquira Díaz's life and that is anything but ordinary. She was born in Puerto Rico to a Latino father and a white mother. Her mother and maternal grandmother were both schizophrenic and addicts. Her father has his own issues. Her paternal grandmother was a lifeline. From a very early age, Diaz lived an edgy messy life, first in Puerto Rico and then in Miami.

There's a lot of stuff covered in this book, but it does talk about a lot of important things that doesn't just go on in her life, but other girls who have gone through, or is going through things she did in her childhood.It’s about Puerto Rico, the United States, and the history between the two.

Díaz's words was so echoing and I really loved the spiral of chaos her life was. Her words was beautiful and so consistent that it made me want to read more about her life. It was a little messy and a little unorganized in some places as she talked about her childhood and it was a little odd in some places.