Customer Reviews

Growing Up Female: Stories By Women Writers From the American Mosaic (Mentor)

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These short stories present a rich and powerful tapestry of what it means to grow up female. They are stories that touch on a variety of experiences from a varierty of viewpoints. They are sweet and disturbing, funny and tragic. They have turned me on to a list of beautiful writers that I may not have met otherwise. I've read it again and again over the past ten years and always walk away with a new ah-ha.

Growing Up Female is an anthology of very forgetable stories that make up this "American mosaic". There are short stories and excerpts from larger works by authors like Amy Tan, Gloria Naylor, and Julia Alvarez.

This book didn't resonate with me very much because the stories are dated and the situations not ones I could relate to. One of the stories by author Sandra Cisneros called "My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn" is so bad that I should have seen it coming just from the nutty title. Actually I did. When she started talking about picking knee scabs and eating it, I knew skipping that one was in order. How it got into an anthology with Gloria Naylor and Amy Tan is beyond me.

Though many of the stories are mediocre at best, there are some diamonds in the rough. Amy Tan is always a pleasure to read and her excerpt from "The Joy Luck Club", dealing with difficult mother/daughter relationships, is no exception. Other notable stories are Diane Levenberg's "The Ilui", a very intelligent piece about a young writer taking her first steps to a great career and dealing with life as it comes; and, among others, Gloria Naylor's "The Women of Brewster Place", my personal favorite about a young African American woman who feels her mother does not understand her need to embrace her blackness, But her mother, a formidable lady understands all too well, and knows her daughter much better than the young lady knows herself.

This anthology is cited for women's studies and illustrates the lives of women from different socio-economic backgrounds that represent what it is to be a female in America.

B read.