Posted on April 24, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Hi, Soraya,
Thanks for reading YA or STFU and submitting a comment. You’re right: as someone who doesn’t identify as Latina, I definitely can’t speak from a point of experience with regards to this novel. And this might well be one of the reasons I had a hard time really getting into the book. In the case of Down to the Bone, I’m more of an “outsider” reader of the novel than an “insider.”
That said, I’m not sure I can value a book just because it addresses an important circumstance from a distinct and often unheard perspective. While I appreciate Dole’s story in terms of the way it represents an all-too-often unheard minority, I feel like the book itself suffers for its ambition. I would have preferred it if one conflict could have taken center stage, rather than the myriad of challenges appearing one after the next. While I recognize that in “real life” challenges come one after the other and don’t resolve nearly so neatly, I felt like Dole was using these challenges as the sole source of Laura’s characterization and that we never got to get to know the narrator on her own terms which, ironically, were the terms she was seeking to define throughout the novel.
Posted on October 19, 2008 at 3:58 pm
I don’t think that this book suffered for it ambitiousness. It was a great and clever plot line. I that Mayra Dole did a great job with this book and comend Harper Collins for take a huge risk with this book.
I also feel that this was a topic that needs to be talked about in fiction books before stories like this will come out in the nonfiction section.
Posted on April 24, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Hi. I was looking for info for teens who’ll be doing a reading of Down to the Bone today at a lesbian shelter for LGBTQ kids who get kicked out of the house and have nowhere to go. these kids LOVE Down to the Bone and relate totally to it. I was SO surprised to read your review and wondered if we read the same book? I strongly dissagree with your review on the novel. As a Cuban lesbian, I and my other friends who have read it, loved it! We couldn’t put it down and are hoping for a sequel. Dole’s book has everything I as a Latina could not find in any LGBTQ literature. Having experienced similar pain as Laura, the main character in the novel, my high school experience in Miami loosing friends, and being kicked out of the house as a teen by my own mom for being a lesbian, is not a formula you can conjure up. It’s real it happens and it is still happening. I read some of the author’s interviews and it’s semi-autobiorgraphical. You, not being a Latina, may not have experienced something like this as a young adult therefore can give a book like this a bad review, but others who need it, can have an empowering story to give them hope and make them laugh. This is a book I wish I could have read when I was a teen! I strongly recommend others to read for themselves and form their own oppinion.