This book was unputdownable. I intended to read a few chapters this morning and I ended up reading the whole thing. It was very, very readable, but by no means easy to read. This is a memoir to be read with caution, and awareness of themes of suicide, sexual assault, child abuse, mental illness, racism, violence and drug use all the way through. But if it’s safe for you to read, it’s a must read memoir. The narrative is tightly woven and I liked the way that it was threaded together by theme in points, abandoning chronology in favour of chasing down memories related to the moment she was telling the reader about. It made it a little confusing at points, and I had to consciously fit the chronological timeline back together, but I think the emotional effect it imparted was well worth a little confusion. Reading ORDINARY GIRLS felt a lot to me like I was being told the story by Jaquira and that just made it feel more personal. I also liked that in high-emotion moments, the novel-esque prose would loosen and sentences would get longer and run-on, making it feel even more like I was being spoken to. The narrative choices supported the story beautifully, making it heartbreaking and impossible to put down.

I can’t imagine the kind of courage it took for Jaquira to write this book, but I’m glad that she did and that I stumbled into the chance to read it. She doesn’t shy away from the truth of her actions and is brutally honest about her own actions as well as others. ORDINARY GIRLS is a story about a girl who has been persistently othered, even by her own white grandmother, and has been given whiplash by her family, loving and neglectful in equal turns. There’s no glossing over in this memoir, it’s raw and open and it hurt to read at points, and I felt myself aching for a happy ending, even though I know things aren’t so easy in real life. There’s no magical fix it here, just a girl who discovers that she’s willing to work for her future, willing to fight to live after all and who grows into a woman who’s a survivor to her core.

When Jaquira Díaz began writing her memoir, Ordinary Girls, in 2006, few of us would have been able to predict that a former reality TV star would be the President of the United States, and that the current moment would so expose the depth of racism, sexism, and class privilege inherent in the American experience. Yet, while reading Ordinary Girls, I couldn’t think of another personal story that so clearly acts as a refutation of the ugliness of the Trump era.

Born in Puerto Rico, the child of a black father and a white mother, Díaz learned early about the political power of poetry and of the written word. In her book she recounts a complex yet happy early childhood. Then when her family moved to Florida, her life changed, not only because she was suddenly surrounded by a community that viewed her as an outsider, but because her father’s infidelity and her mother’s mental illness increasingly impacted her daily life, throwing her into a cycle of depression and anger.

The young Jaquira, or “Jaqui,” acted out, drinking too much, getting in fights, getting arrested. She faced sexual violence and bigotry against gay people. A recurring trope of the book is the idea of the monstrous feminine, and Díaz explores how she, as a young queer woman and a daughter of abuse, both faced monsters and took on the mantle of “monstruo” herself.

Despite how dire the summary of this story sounds, the memoir is ultimately a cry of hope. Díaz rises above her challenges, and ultimately, this book is the proof of her triumph.

This memoir is so engrossing, it reads like a novel. The author's childhood is haunting and I honestly had to put the book down at certain moments because it was just too heavy and I needed to take a step back for my own mental health. But that just speaks to how powerful the writing is. I would have liked a little more information, particularly about her moves later in life, but this is a memoir, not a biography, and we are privileged to have this book out in the world. Four and a half stars, rounded up to five. Trigger warnings for sexual violence, armed and unarmed physical violence, drug use, suicide (a lot of all of these things).

Ordinary Girls is a pretty raw memoir but I thought it was really worth reading. Jaquira Diaz 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. Her memoir is not linear. She narrates experiences, feelings and observations, more or less in chronological order. By the end, she explains that she called her memoir Ordinary Girls as a tribute to her younger self and all other girls and women who have lived messy reckless lives -- they are all worthy humans and no one should be left behind. I liked the way she moved her memoir in that direction. I liked the writing and the rawness. It doesn't make for an easy read but it's well worth it. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy.

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz
This is a great read about a timely topic. Diaz's coming of age memoir about growing up in Puerto Rico while dealing with a schizophrenic mother pulls at your heartstrings while being all too real. She lays it all out on the line and doesn't sugar coat anything, but it does give hope to anyone who may be struggling with who they are.

“There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez

Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, and unflinching memoir from a wildly talented debut author. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. 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 triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.

I absolutely loved the story, Memoirs are my jam and this was a good one.

As I read this, I both didn't want to put it down and wanted to stop reading - this memoir is raw and distressing and beautifully written. It was hard to keep track of time and place at points, but that felt intentional, as Jaquira's life was so scattered itself. The amount of obstacles Jaquira faces from such a young age - domestic violence, sexual assault, addiction, mental illness - are heartbreaking to read about, but her ability to bare her soul on the page and show how she pushed through were inspiring to read. I especially appreciated her focus on the friendships that got her through really tough times.

This was a surprising book. A memoir of growing up in Peurto Rico and Miami Beach, in an extremely dysfunctional family. Díaz’s mother and maternal grandmother both have mental illness and drug addiction. Her father seems more concerned with chasing other women, or something. It is her father’s mother that saves Díaz, her abuela. The book is lyrical and written well, in many ways amazing.

How do you survive poverty? How do you survive drug addicted mother, parents that split up? How do you survive a childhood where the mother is the child’s worst danger? Where babies are found dead, brutalized and starved, left in bushes by an uncaring mother and her lesbian lover. How do you claim your sexuality when you’re attacked by a child even?

Díaz is a strong writer. The book is not linear, and perhaps if it was it would be overwhelming. It was for her to live her life, and at the end we, as well as Díaz are amazed she did survive. Not only survive, but thrive.

An amazing book, not an easy read, but recommended.

While Ordinary Girls wasn't one of my most anticipated 2019 reads, I'm so glad I found it on NetGalley. This book. Whew. Jaquira Diaz's writing is unbelievable, and I gobbled up every page in no time. I've never read something quite like this - an ode to friendship, to anger, to resilience, to dancing, to living, to loving, to ordinary girls living their extraordinary lives. Moving from Puerto Rico to Miami at a young age, Diaz must deal with her mother's schizophrenia diagnosis and drug abuse, the violence she suffers from at home and inflicts on others at school, and the sexual abuse she deals with during multiple incidents - all as a child and teenager. This is a tough read - but Diaz is able to show us the poetry, the music, the beauty in her life as well, choosing to focus on it just as much as the darkness. Diaz is able to show us her world, a world we hardly ever - if ever- see written down on the page - one of queer, brown girls whose friendships keep them alive when family can't. My only qualm was the fractured ending - the inclusion of Puerto Rican history in the last chapter was welcome, but it was hard to follow since it hadn't been mentioned before. I cannot wait to read more of Diaz's work - I feel confident that she'll be one of the top upcoming writers of the 2020s.

Memoirs are not usually something I pick up to read, but after hearing about this book over the summer, I knew it was a book I wanted to read. Diaz has a powerful voice and gives an uncompromising look at her life. She does not hold back as she narrates her childhood growing up in Puerto Rico, until her family moved to Miami Beach, her time as a juvenile delinquent, a drug addict and a Navy recruit. She did not have an easy life -her father was apathetic about his children and family, and her mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. What I appreciated most about her voice was the lack of judgment. To accept her parents, and herself for who they are, not what people believe they should be was such a strong and beautiful story. While my life was nothing like Diaz's growing up, she brings the reader into her experiences and I began to live Jaquira's life along side her. This memoir is not told in a linear fashion, so there were a few areas that I was confused, as she goes into the future while talking about the past. This is not an easy read, but I feel a necessary one.

I gave this one 30% and could not connect. Memoirs are my favorite genre and while this one was interesting, I found a disconnect between the narrator and the plot. Maybe if it had been written with a linear time line and more descriptions of her surroundings...

This memoir is definitely a perspective that I think contributes to the breadth of voices in literature and I'm happy to have seen it published. Unfortunately, it ended up falling flat for me. The entire narrative stayed at one level and the story dragged.

This was one of my most anticipated books of 2019 and it didn't let me down, this memoir read like fiction. Jaquira grew up with a father that didn't want her around and a schizophrenic mom that treated her mental illness with illegal drugs. The amount of self hated Jaquira had growing up was heartbreaking. The quote "you never know what someone is going through, be kind” was basically written about her. She walked around mad at the world because she was just looking for love and compassion which she never got from her parents. It was a wonderful coming of age book about finding yourself and growing up in a rough world. ⁣⁣

Jaquira Diaz writes from her heart and what we get is an absolute beautiful narrative that keeps you turning the page. The best kind of nonfiction reads like a work of fiction, and Ordinary Girls is just that.

There are some stories when you hear them you wonder 'how did you survive.' Their story is filled with the unimaginable and harrowing and also filled with tragedy, Ordinary Girls is just that, and its title is so far from the truth, not ordinary at all. I loved this book. It gripped me and kept me questioning. One of the quotes that truly stood out was

“We were not the girls they wanted us to be. What kind of girl, they loved to say. What kind of girl, even as they took what we gave, took what we tried to hold on to. Our voices. Our bodies. We were trying to live, but the world was doing its best to kill us.”

A wonderful read that is full of depth.

This is a hard book to review. In part because it's so different from what I generally read (I almost exclusively read fiction and most often mystery/suspense/thriller), and in part because it's just so painful. It's remarkable the levels of pain humans are capable of inflicting upon one another. And especially people who are supposed to, and claim to, love you! It's truly heartbreaking. Diaz is a talented writer, her style accessible, engaging and straight-forward. And though her childhood experience was vastly different from mine, I connected with her story and empathized with a girl who was struggling to find connection and, at times, found it more appealing to simply end the struggle. And while there were connecting threads throughout - the "ordinary girls" theme, the Lollipops Baby - I mostly got the sense that rather than setting out to write a book, Diaz wrote a lot of essays and collated them as a book. Which is a fine approach, but it felt a little too trying to have it both ways; it needed more cohesion to read as a book, or more distinction to read as a collection of essays. Instead it read sort of in the in between as neither. It's a tough read for sure, not what I would call enjoyable, but there's value in Diaz's story and in her voice in telling it.

This memoir is a study of grit, determination and survival. It is hard to wrap my head around the abuse, neglect and poverty that Jaquira Diaz endured. A compelling read and one that will stay with me for a while.
I received an ARC of this memoir from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I received Ordinary Girls by Diaz, free, from Net Gallery in exchange for an honest review.
This book is a memoir of what it was like growing up inPuerto RICO and Miami Beach.
Jaquira is caught between her mother battling schizophrenia, and the violence that existed in her life.
She struggles with depression and sexual assault
She also feels great despair in trying to find love.
This is a very powerful memoir

Oddly enough, as the title implies, these are ordinary girls, and as we learn at the end, some girls moved on to successful careers, while others died young, Diaz goes out of her way to detail her wild adventures of growing up with her friends, her unfortunate experiences with her schizophrenic, drug addicted mother, and the less ordinary father who recites poetry and is very socially aware of his surroundings, even if he is a less than perfect father, which, is all ordinary to some degree, yet I felt we missed a lot of our author's life after she had her last cigarette and joined the Navy, setting her on a new path. Doing drugs and wild car rides tends to fall into a similar pattern and becomes a bit repetitious. This is a memoir that will resonate loudly for many, and the author is hoping it will not only ring true, but will land in the hands of girls who are in the same position she once was, and that they will become survivors, fighters, and break free. I think this book will serve to motivate others, will help others feel less alone, and realize there are others like them, and they will live to be older than eighteen, and they will succeed. I'm looking forward to her next book.

Thanks to Netgalley and Algonquin for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Jaquira Diaz has had quite the life. It’s not easy to read about all of the crazy things she has endured in her life- such as a mother and grandmother with mental illness, friends dying, drugs, violence, etc. I found it very unsettling and felt sorrow for the author.

The jumping around chronologically made this an even tougher read for me. I wish it would have followed a more linear path. It didn’t quite flow for me and I found myself skimming over the random info she threw in on crimes or some historical figures (I didn’t quite get the connection to the story).

Overall an insightful story, and from a perspective that we don’t hear from much at all (Puerto Rican). I wanted to like this more but the jumping around made it a tough read.

I always find it difficult to review memoirs because it feels as though you are judging someone's life. In this case, Jacqui has been judged enough, mostly by herself. This is a raw coming of age memoir set in Puerto Rico and Miami. Nothing in her early life would make anyone think that Diaz would be where she is today. There's alcoholism, mental illness, abuse, self loathing, and terrible neighborhoods. There's realizing you are gay and learning to live your truth when others hate it. Some chapters feel more polished than others and Diaz tells more about the warts of her life than the positives. I wouldn't compare this to Educated as it stands on it's own and comes at life from an entirely different perspective. This does not emphasize education as the way out of darkness but it does shine a light on how a woman made her way into the world. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. A good read; I'm looking forward to reading more of her work.