Towelhead: A Novel [Paperback]

Alicia Erian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2006

It is August 1990. Saddam Hussein has just invaded Kuwait, and Jasira's mother has bought her daughter a one-way ticket to Texas to live with her strict Lebanese father. Living in a neat model home in Charming Gates, just outside of Houston, Jasira struggles with her father's rigid lifestyle and the racism of her classmates, who call her "towelhead." For the first time, the painful truth hits her: she's an Arab. Her aching loneliness and growing frustration with her parents' conflicting rules drive her to rebel in very dangerous ways. Most disturbingly, she becomes sexually obsessed with the bigoted army reservist next door, who alternately cares for, excites, and exploits her.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Thirteen-year-old Jasira wants what every girl wants: love and acceptance and the undivided attention of whoever she's with. And if she can¹t get that from her parents, then why not from her mother's boyfriend, or her father's muscle-bound neighbor, Mr. Vuoso? Alicia Erian¹s incandescent debut novel, Towelhead, will ring true for readers who remember the rarely poetic transition from childhood to young adulthood. Jasira is a creature of contradiction: both innocent (reading romantic intentions into the grossest displays of lust) and oddly clear-sighted, especially when it comes to the imbalance of power, and the things we do for love. When her mother exiles her to Houston to live with Jasira's strict, quick-to-anger Lebanese father, she quickly learns what aspects of herself to suppress in front of him. In private, however, she conducts her sexual awakening with all the false confidence that pop culture and her neighbor's Playboy magazines have provided.

Jasira tells her story with candor and glimmers of dark, unexpected humor--as when she describes her mother's boyfriend Barry's assistance in her personal grooming: "A week later, Barry broke down and told her the truth. That he had shaved me himself. That he had been shaving me for weeks. That he couldn't seem to stop shaving me." The freshness of her narrative voice sets Towelhead apart from the sentimental or purely harsh treatment of similar subject matter elsewhere, and makes the novel a promising follow-up to Erian¹s well-regarded short story collection, The Brutal Language of Love. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Erian (The Brutal Language of Love) takes a dogged, unflinching look at what happens as a young woman's sexuality blooms when only a predatory neighbor is paying attention. After 13-year-old Jasira is sent to live with her father in Houston ("I didn't want to live with Daddy. He had a weird accent and came from Lebanon"), she finds herself coming of age in the shadow of his old world, authoritarian ideas, which include a ban on tampons (they're for married women, he insists) and a friendship with a boy who's black. Trapped between her father's rigidity and a wider culture that seems without rules, Jasira is left to handle puberty on her own, as well as her budding sexual desire and an ongoing longing for love and acceptance. Her creepy neighbor, Mr. Vuoso, senses her desires, and she responds eagerly to his sexual overtures. His willingness to eroticize her is heightened by how exotic—as well as distasteful—he finds her, a half–Middle Eastern child living in America on the eve of the first Gulf War. He hires Jasira to baby-sit for his son, and it's clear that their relationship will destroy them. The writing is not subtle—indeed, it can be quite clunky—but as a meditation on race, adolescence and alienation, the novel has moments of power.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743285123
• ISBN-13: 978-0743285124
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,342,055 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A decent read, but not about Arabic or Lebanese culture..., July 3, 2005

By 

A. Jammal (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Towelhead: A Novel (Hardcover)

I won't waste space here describing the book, as others here have already given great reviews with all the details of the background and characters. I will say that I picked up this book in a large bookstore, intrigued by the title, the Lebanese flag on the jacket, and the hope that it would be a story of the inevitable clash of culture in the Arab-American family. As the American half of an Lebanese-American family, I initially wanted to love it. I admit I quite often found it as hard to put down as it was hard to keep reading. I literally threw it across the room at one point, as I began to hate how this young girl's life was evolving. I was also once a thirteen year-old girl, and I agree with the other reviewers that Jasira's narrative makes her seem much younger than that. However, her sad existence up to that point (the product of the world's most selfish parents) almost make it understandable. She is so starved for atttention, that I knew immediately as I read, what would happen to her. I also realized that this was so much less a novel about her culture (or, rather, the culture of her father), and more a novel about her sexual awakening, and her search for love and attention. Therefore, the title really seems out of place. Her ethnicity is really not a part of the book, and as her features or appearance is never really described, it makes one wonder why others would taunt her with such a name. I, like many other reviewers here, was also amazed that the glaring error of claiming Lebanon as a North African country passed by the editors, and not once, but several times! The writer should know, as well, that most Lebanese Christians do not even identify themselves with Arab culture at all. Naming a child after Yasir Arafat simply would not happen in a Christian Lebanese family.

I would recommend this book only to those who are not bothered by graphic sexual descriptions, and to those who are not (like I was) looking for a book about Arab-Americans and their experiences. As a coming-of-age story, it is touching, and it does stay with you long after you finish.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, May 3, 2005

By 

Katrina Denza "KatDenza" (NC, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Towelhead: A Novel (Hardcover)

In Towelhead, Alicia Erian's debut novel, readers are offered a view of what it might be like to grow up a child of two parents of different cultures. We may not leave with any more idea about that than we had coming into the novel but we will get a glimpse of a whole lot more than we probably bargained for.
Thirteen year old Jasira, the main character of the novel, is at once notably naive and sophisticated as she determines the best way to walk across the thin ice of her parents' making. Her mother, a controlling, self-centered, unloving school teacher won't show Jasira how to shave her bikini line so that Jasira may feel comfortable at the swimming pool. For some unknown reason, Jasira's mother is uncomfortable with Jasira's developing body. Her mother's boyfriend steps in and does the shaving, swimsuit on, and when her mother finds out, Jasira is sent away to live with her father.
If the reader is looking for some relief for Jasira in the home of her father, they will be disappointed because Daddy turns out to be even more uncomfortable than her mother with not only Jasira's body, but the very idea of her existence. Not only are Daddy's rules unreasonable but they are unpredictable and Jasira has to second guess everything that comes out of her mouth.
Next door lives a pedophile who throughout the book seems to be the one abuser of the three (mother, father, neighbor) that holds any amount of conflicting feelings and guilt regarding his actions whereas the mother and father remain oblivious to their offenses.
Added to the mix are the politics of war (although Erian does not dig all that deep in this area); adolescent sexuality; and racial issues (again not a lot of depth to the issue of racial differences).
Jasira is lucky to find an advocate in another neighbor: a pregnant newlywed with more of a world view than others around Jasira, who ultimately rescues her from both of her parents and the pedophile.
Among the criticism Towelhead has received, what stood out to me was the complaint the narrator sounds younger than her thirteen years. Initially I thought the same thing. The first sentence: "My mother's boyfriend got a crush on me, so she sent me to live with Daddy," sounds as if it came from a girl a couple of years younger than Jasira's thirteen. It's only after reading further that I was able to gain some insight as to why Jasira's mental and emotional health may have seemed arrested at times. Under the constant emotional and physical abuse of her parents it would have been more unbelievable if she had come across as mentally, emotionally, and spiritually together.
This is a book that is not easy to read-Erian's straight storytelling does not make the abuse Jasira endures more comfortable for the reader. For that reason among many others, I recommend you do read it.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very sharp intelligence produced this, August 1, 2005

By 

Michael Huggins (Memphis, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Towelhead: A Novel (Hardcover)

As noted by other reviewers, Erian's (and her editor's) apparent ignorance of the true location of Lebanon is amazing. Other than that, the book is a marvel. It pulled me in from the very first sentence, and I read the first 200 or so pages in a day. If I didn't know better, I would think this was a true, autobiographical account written by a 13-year-old. She's cunning and clever, and in some ways very insightful, but not yet wise. On one level, she reminds me of the hapless stenographer of A.N. Wilson's novel, "Wise Virgin," of some years ago. On another, the naive protagonist of Mary Gordon's "Final Payments."

Only one episode did not ring true to me: that the little girl's racist neighbor would not have been enraged and threatened violence when he learned that the girl and her black friend from school had let themselves into his house and harassed his son. And I find it hard to believe anyone, no matter how sympathetic, agreeing to keep a dead cat in her freezer, although I suppose anything is possible. Other than that, every reaction, every episode, and every character seemed real, and I had absolutely no idea how it would turn out. Up to the last few pages, I still thought it would end tragically.

Erian took three years to write this, destroying an initial 100-page draft because the voice sounded too adult. Her hard work shows: the voice is one of the most authentic things about this book.