From Publishers Weekly
A mother and daughter of Puerto Rican and Jewish ancestry, the Moraleses express their radical and feminist views in diary-like poetry and prose that echo the rhetoric of the '60s. Yet the mixed origins of this pair lend an international, even universal feeling to the sentiments. They seem to speak for many women of many places and times. Titles of their pieces include "Concepts of Pollution," "Distress Signals," "Getting Out Alive," "Class Poem" and "I Am the Reasonable One." Both authors are literary, serious, socially concerned and passionate, and their anger is about injustices that plague them and other people. There is much vivid imagery and heartfelt emotion, and the reader may well long for causes that stir them as these women are stirred.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Rosario and Aurora Morales are mother and daughter; Rosario was born in Puerto Rico, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who moved to New York when Rosario was young; Aurora was born in New York and as a child, moved with her parents to Puerto Rico. Getting Home Alive is their book. Written in alternating voices, these sketches, short stories, and poems celebrate the lives of mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters, friends, and family spanning continents, generations, languages, religions, and cultures. Home is where the children are born, the food smells of garlic and oregano, the language is loose and round and rolls fluidly from the mouth, and green hillsides are outside kitchen windows. Home is in any kitchen, wherever it is, when the table cloth woven by one grandmother, "dyed by another, embroidered by another still.. [is].. put there in the center every year in memory of our mothers." Home is all the places both have lived; "even Chicago, grim old gritty dust heap of a city had its blues its trains, had its Northern Black Irish Polish Russian Hillbilly Puerto Rican Ojibwe meatpacking railroad citylake city spirit, worthy of love." Home is sadness for the English language when it is "robbed of the beat your home talk could give it, the words you could lend, the accent, the music, the word-order reordering, the grammatical twist." Home is in the hearts from which Rosario and Aurora speak. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
