Customer Reviews

Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is terrific! I'm almost done and it kept me up till 5am..AGAIN. I've been a dumbek player in a troupe who has been playing about 10 years, and an on and off beginning dancer occasionally, so I have been into the dance scene for a while. So many of the stories in the book sound like they could have happened up here. I knew JUST what she meant. The divas, the cliques, LOL. I've been to those dance shows, I've been at those gigs (or well, not quite as bad as that restaurant LOL but..). Its just hysterical. I'm so glad nearly everyone has given it 5 stars.

One thing I really enjoyed was hearing more about all these familiar names. I'm hearing names of people that i've heard of before, seen before (Morocco) talked to in email when ordering stuff(Lucy), or even know somewhat(Anthea). It really shows what a small world this is. Not every day do you read about people you know in a book!

I bought this book because of the bellydance, but also really enjoyed the whole single 30s woman relating and coping and trying to find true love part. There seem to be a number of books on that line lately, and I tried to read a few of the more popular ones. A couple were just so silly and unrealistic, I couldn't relate, and quickly ended up flung against the wall to land in the bad bad book heap. Anne's on the other hand is very intelligently written. She's not talking down to us. She's someone I could see hanging out with. She's real. Though I haven't had quite the adventurous heavy metal tatoo past that she has had, I could still totally relate. Its a very down to earth book in that way.

So..5 stars!
Anne if you read these come to Michigan and do a book tour please! There are lots of dancers here, and plenty of arabic culture too. Arabic night clubs and a whole stores with just arabic music.

Despite the fact that Ms. Soffee and I are probably opposite ends of the conservative range, and that I would no more get a tattoo, then I would bungee jump off of Mt. McKinley, I really could relate to her. I guess when it comes down to getting dumped, learning to love yourself and finding your own identity, we're all the same, regardless. The background of belly dance was an added bonus, since I have always had a fascination with its beauty and mystery. The real appeal of the whole book, though, is Anne's sense of Far Side type humor. To look at life and see what is humorously skewed is a rare gift, and Anne has it in spades. I'll keep this one for my own library.

This is not just a book about belly-dancing. It is the ironic, intelligently-written, and uplifting anthem of a woman scorned trying to put her life back together by reimagining herself and investing her quite considerable energies into bellydance. It is memoir-turned-chick-lit with all the requisite plotpoints. The crushing breakup. The sleepless, obsessive nights on the internet. The nightmare first dates. The happy ending. The author-turned-heroine is lovable in her honesty about her flaws and insecurity and readers will cheer her to the very end.

This isn't a book geared to belly-dancers, though dancers will probably enjoy the world they see within. It is geared towards the every-woman that has come out of a relationship heartbroken and uncertain.

If you do nothing else, read the exerpt provided above. Soffee's voice and charm and wit will do the rest. Highly recommended!

I have been Belly Dancing for 5 years and know people excactly like Ms. Soffee describes. I haven't laughed so hard reading a book in a very long time. I was so enthralled with this book that I am going to sell it at the North Texas Middlle Eastern Dance Association's annual dinner show event! Even if you don't Belly Dance you will appreciate the sarcasm of Ms. Soffee and the events in the book.

This book has its good moments. The author has a good wit, decent story-telling skills, and definitely keeps the pace moving (a little too frantic, though, at times). Her bellydancing memoirs were the saving grace, for me. Barely. Because the rest of the time she spent bemoaning her life through the lens of her precious identity as a "half-Lebanese half-Christian computer-geek tattoo-nerd ex-groupie who just wants to be hip and find true love." (Seriously, she repeats this phrase, with variations, at least 150 times through a 200-page book). I'm sure this woman has some redeeming qualities, but she went on about her insecurities and desperation to find "THE ONE" at such lengths that I was just about ready to smack her by the end. The author is a 30-something married woman whose emotional maturity apparently got stuck in 8th grade.

The book begins with her getting booted by a total chump, a tattoo-artist scenester who likes to hang out with 17 year-olds and play video games. Their relationship lasted about 6 months; she wails about her heartbreak for at least two years while trying to "move on with her life" (this is when she begins dancing--a courageous declaration of her pursuit of self). So she embarks on this manic quest to reclaim her half-Lebanese roots (never mind the other half) and decides she MUST have a husband of Arabic descent. In the process, she goes from a fundamentalist Muslim playboy (for whom she was willing to convert to Islam and be 3rd wife) to a born-again Christian (for whom she was willing to be saved, and she was just sure he was going to leave his wife for her), and each time goes all out to re-arrange her life and beliefs to suit each of them, merely because they are of Arabic descent. She ends the book with a short philosophical reverie in which she admits she finally gives up on Arabic men and instead married a gun-slinging right-wing conservative paramilitary type (who was, GASP, WHITE!!) and for all I could tell, is settled down now, happy as pie. To which I have to ask: girl, where are YOU in all this? Where are YOUR core values, YOUR beliefs, YOUR principals? Ever heard of common interests? Having your OWN personality, perhaps, independent of a partner???

Oh, and she also ends the book by sharing her ground-breaking realization that maybe it's ok to not be hip, to not be the coolest one on the block, to sit at the popular kids' table, etc., because life is really about pursuing what makes you happy. Or some such schmaltz.

So...I give kudos to a new author for having gotten her book published, and for giving some insight into life as a bellydancer in modern urban USA, but I sincerely hope her future writing is not in the memoir genre.

In this upbeat, quirky memoir, "nerd" girl Anne Thomas Soffee discovers belly dance in her own hometown of Richmond, Virginia. With chatty, self-deprecating humor, Soffee relays her ambivalent ascent among small town divas with delicate egos and mysteriously prim "cardinal rules." County fairs, nursing homes, and moose lodge performances form the springboard for her plunge through rosewater and musk scented veils to her own self-acceptance.

The second story line follows Soffee's search for "true love" or, more accurately, her search for a man to marry. Though her belly dance ambitions cast a unique light on her otherwise typical tactics--computer singles sites, churches, and coffee houses--the technically keen writer disappoints here. The Arab men who enter her life as potential dating partners never rise above the naïve preconceptions (oil sheik, stifled intellectual, "born-again self-hater") shared by Soffee and her friends before they are dismissed with caustic wit. Equally baffling is the gun-toting, ex-Marine, strip club bouncer nine years her junior who slides the ring on her finger too late in the work to reveal his appeal.

Of greater interest is Soffee's quest to better understand her own ethnic identity. Half Lebanese and Maronite Catholic, belly dancing allows her to investigate the real and imagined vulnerabilities of her family's assimilation over several generations into mainstream American culture. Gruff, proud, and protective, her family is humorously portrayed along with a few other Arab Americans who ambivalently lurk around the edges of performances and haflas. Rather than an omission, this untapped cultural tension feels like the seed for a second work by this engaging and original new writer.

When I first came upon this book I wrinkled my nose. Belly dancing? I don't know...I'm a 34-year-old guy who loves hockey and football...what do I care about belly dancing? Rest assured, this book is certainly more than dancing. A very entertaining read from an author who is brutally (and refreshingly) honest and funny. This is one of the few books I could really recommend to almost anyone.

What was the last book you read that made you laugh out loud and smile all the way through it? My answer is Snake Hips~!!!
It's not only a book about bellydancing, it's a book about recovering from a bad relationship, finding roots and finding oneself. And best of all finding her true love.
It also could be read as a do and don't book for daters, both male and female.
It made me wish I was Lebanese, and it made me wish i could find a subculture as fascinating as the world of the bellydancer. It made me yearn for more from this author. I want to read about her pre-bellydancing life. Hmmm? I want to read more about the "happily ever after" as she did find her prince. He isn't Arabic tho; could this couple be the 21st century version of Lucy and Ricky? More , more, i want to read more about this interesting woman and her journey through life.

Ms. Soffee's tale is about too much more than fits on the front cover--it's about family and recovery, about time and maturity, about finding a voice and using it. Bridget Shcmidget--this ain't that at all! (and if you think it is you got another think coming) I like this book a lot. It is on my bookshelf and there it will stay.

What really shines through this book is the presence of culture--whether the trash hip culture of the tattoo artist and his 'too hip' friends or the lebanese culture of her family or the belly dance culture--all handled with affection and verismo.

My only problem here is that I gave away my copy and the bookstore is all out. Now where could I order one.....? (my bookshelf is complaining about the empty space)

This book was given to me as a birthday present from a good friend (we are both belly dancers of five years). What a gift! I loved it! It was so amusing that I was grinning like an idiot as I read it in the waiting room of a hospital of all places. The author's witty but humble tone was irresistible to me - it made me adore her. From my personal standpoint, I could really relate to her infatuation and developing true love of the dance as I have "been there, done that, am still doing it". But I think that others who aren't belly dancers might find it an interesting "inside peek" to the magic carpet ride of belly dance - the sparkle, the jingle, the glitz, the costumes, the drama, the friendships, the music, the moves, including the not-so-glamorous side of things. Also, as a bi-racial person who actually looks pretty Caucasian as the author kind of describes herself, I could really relate to her reflections on her own mixed ethnicity. I totally "felt her". I can also see how this story could be uplifting to a person recovering from the heartache of a bad breakup. I would have said that this is a good "chick read" for any woman but I can see from the reviews that I would be wrong. It looks like plenty of guys are loving it too. The only bad thing about the book was that I finished it too quickly - I wanted more! Shimmy on!