Customer Reviews

Dirty Girls Social Club

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(40)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I feel awful doing this, because there is such a shortage of Latino literature on the market that it hurts to slam anything out there, even if it's bad. "The Dirty Girls' Social Club" was just that - bad. I picked it up based on a review calling it good beach reading on my vacation, grabbed a hat and some sunscreen, and wasted a few hours.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez wrote her book with an admirable idea in mind - portray Latina women as strong, diverse people with interests and goals other than those portrayed by mainstream media. However, she sorely fails in reaching her own lofty goal. Her main character, Lauren, is without a doubt the most unsympathetic charater I have ever had the misfortune to read. The premise surrounding Rebecca's story was just ridiculous (I wish I could find someone willing to just throw a one million dollar check at me after one meeting!), as were the circumstances surrounding Sara's spousal abuse. Usnavys was just plain ludicrous, inside and out, and completely fell into the money-hungry, label-seeking sterotype that many people have of Latin women.

The most compelling parts of the story, while still having their roots mired in the same unbelievable muck as Sara's, were Elizabeth's. She's also, ironically enough, the most sorely underused character in the book, and the only one I would have liked to see more of. However, it would have been nice if Valdes-Rodriguez remembered that Boston, for all of its surface conservativeness, is actually more liberal than the story allowed it to be, especially with the large Gothic presence in the colleges.

As a Latina myself, I couldn't imagine sitting through this book again, and am SO not looking forward to the movie. Technically, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is a good writer. I'm not convinced, by this offering anyway, that she has what it takes to be a great author.

I cannot believe that St. Martin's actually shelled out as much money as they did for this trivial 'work'. Maybe one day, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez will be a good author, but this offering doesn't show that.
The characters in this book, especially Usnavys, despite Valdes-Rodriguez's efforts, feed into every stereotype Americans have of Latin-American women. Her obsession with labels, her need for a propertied and rich man, all sound like the type of money-grubbing, bling-bling wearing hoochie mama that people have labeled us as.
I didn't pick this book up looking for an intellectual read at all--on the contrary, I was looking for something light and fun to unwind after finals last semester. What I got was a tightening in my gut thinking that this book has a four-star rating on Amazon while it's perpetuating every negative thing that people have to say about Latinas.
The writing itself also drove me bonkers. Valdes-Rodriguez has a choppy style that does this already clunking plot a huge disservice.
I'll never understand what drove the bidding war that resulted in the publication of this book, but I can do one thing to make myself feel better for falling for the hype...I can get my money back. I'd stay far, far away from this wanna-be Sandra Cisneros if I were you.

I was so looking forward to this book after reading about the bidding war and the movie rights, but unfortunately it doesn't live up to the hype.

The characters, six Hispanic girl friends in their late 20s, don't have any depth to them. The dialogue sounds forced. They read as representatives of whatever ethnic group they happen to be from, and not as characters unto themselves. In good books, the characters take on a life of their own, but that just doesn't happen here. One character is so out there (Amber), it's just silly.

Overall, I just wasn't convinced.

When I picture Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez writing this book, here's what I see:

An attractive woman sits at a desk. In front of her is a bulletin board with six character names on it, perhaps written in the center of colorful targets. In her manicured hands are a bunch of darts, each engraved with a different description -- "lesbian", "victim of domestic abuse", "jewish", "christian", "icy", "married to a white guy", "materialistic", "sassy". Actually, I think there must be at least four darts that say "sassy." The author then proceeds to toss the darts, one by one, onto the bulletin board, and then assigns traits to each character based on how the darts land.

There really can't be any other explanation for how she winds up with such paper-flat characters who have such random attributes, many of which are never fully fleshed out and ALL of which just fall right into the well-worn chick-lit groove without offering any fresh insight or expounding upon them in any way except to make the characters Latinas.

If Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez had taken each of these six people and written a separate novel -- hell, even a decent novella -- a succint SHORT STORY for cying out loud!!! -- about each of them, I could have bought it, and enjoyed reading each of them individually. But having six characters thrown at me BAM! BAM! BAM! in such rapid succession not only made my head spin trying to keep up with who was who, it also prevented me from feeling any empathy for any of the characters -- something that's just a *teensy* bit vital for any book featuring . . . characters.

Overall I think this book got attention because there are so few "mainstream" books that feature Latina characters so prominently. I think Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's intentions were good. She wanted to get some stories out there that were about people like her, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just wish she had stuck with getting out one story at a time so that she could devote some real time and energy into creating at least one solid heroine that people could identify with and connect to. Instead I was left with six empty vessels labeled "successful but insecure" or "unhappily married" that I didn't care enough about to even see how their stories ended.

In the end, I simply felt that this book was too convoluted, too unbelievable and far too poorly done to truly represent the Latina community. Or to be more precise: it's just not a very good book.

I honestly don't understand the hype behind this book. It basically reads like an outline that's only been partially filled in, with randomly fleshed-out ideas here and there, and extremely rough character sketches. Usnavys works for a non-profit organization, yet she's a materialistic, money-grubbing gold-digger? I found that combination hard to swallow, although I may have been able to grasp the concept it if Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez had even once showed us Usvnays at her job, which she didn't.

I also had a hard time conjuring up a concrete image of Elizabeth, the super-successful newscaster/hard-core Christian/lesbian, mainly because she didn't seem to have any kind of struggle with being a Christian and a lesbian simultaneously. I do believe that it's possible to be a gay Christian, in fact I know several, but I also know that they've all experienced at least SOMEWHAT of a struggle (if not a long, difficult battle), to reconcile their sexual and spiritual orientations. It just seemed like Elizabeth's only struggle was keeping her personal life a secret from the public, and in real life, I think her struggle would be much more multi-faceted, an adjective AVR has yet to learn. I just had a hard time believing Elizabeth woke up one morning and said "Hmm, I'm feeling a little lesbianish today. Now, what should I wear to church?" Which is basically how AVR portrayed her.

Similarly, Sara's character is described as being a Jewish Cuban, yet we see nothing that illustrates that she's Jewish, other than a brief mention of the fact that she was one of the first Cuban girls in her neighborhood to have a Bat Mitzvah. I was intrigued by this combination of cultures, which-and I'll allow my ignorance to show here-I never knew existed. By the same token, I was disappointed when AVR didn't flesh this concept out at all. She seems to enjoy pinning religions (and jobs) on her characters like name tags, without giving any background or insight into how these belief systems (and jobs) affect her characters' lives.

Overall, I think six narrative characters was too many for AVR to handle. (And doesn't she know the cardinal rule of chick-lit, that women are always friends in groups of four?) All kidding aside, I think a six-narrator story that touches on big social, political, and racial issues (which AVR continually revealed herself to be not all that knowledgeable about) was a little too ambitious of a project for a writer of AVR's caliber. If, in the future, she sticks with more intentionally fluffy pieces and smaller casts of characters, she might do all right as a chick-lit writer, but I found Dirty Girls to be a huge disappointment.

Even though I found this book entertaining in certain parts, and it was enjoyable to read phrases and quirky sayings familiar to my upbringing, this book did not really live up to all the hype. Yes, it was a fun and fast read, but it lacked conviction in terms of character and story development. The voices of each character blurred with one another, some of the storylines were far-fetched, and the ending was like a nicely wrapped-up bow. I recommend it for a lively summer book, but do not expect it to be a profound and life-altering experience. Just like the cover of the book, it is cute and attractive, but that's all it is.

This isn't writing, it is thoughtless blogging. But if you like soap operas and reality tv, perhaps you'll enjoy it.

There are a few real women writers out there, but AVR is not one of them, not yet. However, identity politics seems to bring in a bigger paycheck than writing....so why shouldn't she cash in on that?

I can safely say I did not dispose of this as I did Amy Tan's pantheon to mediocrity, "The Kitchen God's Wife" - that is, as fireplace fodder for my midwinter snuggle with two teenaged bottles of cabernet. Mother and daughters this is not, but more along the lines of "Sex in the City" meets "Tortilla Soup" meets...oh hells, let's just say it - the book [wasnt good]. The language, far from being lyrical or sweet, was stilted, as if someone listened to the language of young women in a Mexican restaraunt and decided that was the way of all female Hispanic vocabulary. The plotlines weaved to and fro in a quite predictable manner (shock! People toss you out on your [rear-end]! Musical greatness is fleeting! Ambition steals your soul! And gosh, all of these are so much harder as a Latina!) I am curious as to why the Dirty Girls seemed so vital to the others. Sorry, but Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez is apparently a much better columnist than a novelist - at least with the column you KNOW the end is coming near before you get so disgusted with the characters that you stop reading.

Probably the worst book I've ever read. Only gave it 1 star because there was no option for a 0 star, or negative stars. She trivializes serious issues of poverty and racism faced by Latinos, and most of her characters are extremely unlikeable, especially Lauren, Usnavys and Rebecca. The book has done more of a disservice in its representation of Latinas than actually breaking stereotypes as it was suppose to. I read certain lines of the books to my Latina friends, and they couldn't believe such garbage had actually been written and hyped up as the Latina Holy Grail!
Not worth the paper it was written on! Pass this dirty girl junk disguised as literature.

The Dirty Girls Social Club was quite the dissapointment for me.

2 reasons:
The first chapter. Paragraph after paragraph, it seemed like the author was just rephrasing the same sentence "latinos and latinas aren't getting the respect they deserve." Good god, and 15 pages later were still on this topic?

and Second, WAY to many characters. 6 girls, 6 lives, and I'm expected to remember them all? One would have to dedicate their lives to this book just to remember every bloody character. This upset me, and often at times I found myself skimming through the first chapter to try to find the introduction on that particular character.

I personally feel that for one to enjoy a book there are to important things that are essential, one: get hooked during the first paragraph. I found this book slow to start, and slow to end. And second: one must connect with the characters, which I found to be impossible, even 3/4 the way through the book.

Too much effort, I gave this book a chance but this was just way too much for one reader to remember.
Thanks.