American Chica : Two Worlds, One Childhood

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Summary: A Haunting Memoir of Peru...
Review: American Chica is an adventure story, a love story, and ultimately a learning to find peace with yourself story. Marie Arana's authorial voice has an authentic, radiant and haunting passion for Peru. Her connection to its almost mystical soil is so palpable it shimmers. She writes about her love for a homeland half-a-world away, and half-a-lifetime away, with descriptions so vivid the reader can feel the hacienda's sand beneath the feet and smell the sugar cane in fields as far as the eye can see. But Ms. Arana draws her readers into her story not on the strength of an exotic locale alone. She writes with penetrating insights into the minds and soul of an extraordinarily gifted family, the strengths and weaknesses of their characters, their humanity. Ms. Arana is able to present the various points of view of her parents' clash of backgrounds without taking sides. Her family members are sympathetic and drawn with depth, as her passionate father makes over-arching efforts to make a good life for his family in Peru and her mother passionately dedicates herself to the education and protection of her children and her North American way of life. Ms. Arana captures our sympathy most of all, as the child caught in the middle, who as she grows up, has to work harder and harder to succeed because being different is a liability in both hemispheres. But it is Peru whose presence in the story is the real protagonist, a member and an outcast of the family, whose terrible and beautiful history loses and gains its soul over and over, but always yearns for a future of redemption and respect. It is now a place reinventing itself for new generations, but the tug of its terrible and entrenched class system holds fast. Ms. Arana has done her research well in this regard and I admire her for presenting unpleasant evidence of institutional racism, corporate greed and rape of the land, and overall rampant exploitation of the under classes. Her eyewitness reports are more than you will ever hear about in school where Spanish teachers are either too pained or too fearful to discuss these issues openly. However, in spite of all the social difficulties, Ms. Arana met a cast of interesting and lovable characters from all walks of life, and for the fleeting years of her childhood, it was a sacred place that filled her young spirit with the fire of imagination and blessed her with a challenging but larger, richer life.

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Summary: Lightyears separate North and South America
Review: Her Peruvian father watched her American mother ink in changes to their wedding license and thus discovered for the first time that she had been married three times before and that her last name was not what he thought it was. He was in love so he said nothing. The wedding ceremony took place. The story of her parents sometimes stormy marriage is a fascinating part of Marie Arana's life story. She was reared in two countrys with differences far greater than most gringos or Latinos know about. The book is beautifully written and wonderfully insightful. Read it for pleasure and come away with greater understanding of another way of life.

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Summary: More than an autobiography, more than a child's memories.
Review: I first heard about "American Chica" listening to an interview of Marie Arana on Public Radio. As she described her parent's wedding I knew I would buy her book. The judge asked her mother to ink in some corrections on the wedding certificate. Her father, a Peruvian, then discovered for the first time that the woman he was about to marry, an American, had been married three times previously and that her last name was not what he thought it was. He said nothing, proceeded with the ceremony and thus begins a life of cultural clashes for the children they bring into the world. Part of their childhood is spent in Peru, part in the U.S. Gringos and gringas will pleasurably learn some things reading about the two very different worlds the children experience. I think that Latinos and Latinas will similarly learn things, but from their perspective, by reading "American Chica."

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Summary: More than just a memoir
Review: Marie Arana's story is so much more than her account of growing up between two continents--North and South America. She contextualizes herself within a particular historical time--both in Peru and in the United States, showing how the "goings on" in the wider culture of both continents affected her own particular development. How she navigates both worlds is what American Chica is all about.

Particularly enlightening to me was Arana's discovery of a theory at the British University of Hong Kong "claiming that bilingualism can hurt you...The bicultural person seems so thoroughly one way in one language, so thoroughly different in another. Only an impostor would hide that other half so well." Since I also grew up "bilingual," Arana's discovery at the British University resonated with my own experience. Just exactly who am I and where is it that I belong? Language is so much more than a vehicle to transmit information. With language we create the "self" and name our environment. That "self" and that environment will look different depending on what language I use. Sometimes the footing is as unsteady as walking the earth after one of those Peruvian earthquakes.

Great job!

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Summary: A symphony of words
Review: This wonderful bio of the author's early years in Peru and the States describes a situation that so many of us find ourselves in these days when we sense that we belong to more than one culture. It is a situation that makes the participant feel like an impostor, always having to somehow fake belonging to one or the other; but it also provides tremendous wealth for we are thus able to get more than just one puny opening to the universe.

The style is rich and the descriptions seem authentic. But what makes the book quite special are the situations the young Marie gets into as she tries with humor and imagination to penetrate the different worlds she comes into contact.

Bien vale la pena.

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Summary: A symphony of words
Review: What a joy to read. Little pieces of information about characters, surroundings, history and culture are put in place like parts of a growing poetic jigsaw puzzle. Although no child this young could be so insightful, the framework enables the author to use the innocence of childhood to view the world in a questioning, accepting way, opening up her world in Peru to the reader like a flower opening slowly petal by petal in the morning. Very mature insights and descriptions of those around her are presented in a very gentle way. The vivid description of the depraved treatment by overseers of the Peruvian natives who were used to gather rubber from the trees tore at this reader's heart by the magnificence of the writing rather than by gory heavyhanded writing.

Fragments of the jigsaw puzzle of life are blended together as the author moves between individual backgrounds, current insights, historical information, explanations of cultural patterns, vivid descriptions of personalities and a storyline that tells how a mother, father and three children see their ongoing lives as viewed thru the eyes of a very mature child.

The book whispers rather than shouts, a rare thing these days.

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Summary: A stunning amount of critical acclaim
Review: What drew my attention to this book was the critical acclaim it was receiving. I've not seen anything like this in a long time: A National Book Award Finalist, a PEN Memoir Award Finalist, winner of Books for a Better Life. The American Library Association (very picky people) chose it as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year. Philadelphia News picked it as THE BEST book of the year. And then the New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, not to mention lots of other newspapers around the country picked it as one of the best books of the year. As a book lover, and someone in the book business, I tend to keep an eye on this sort of thing, so, as I say, it drew my attention.
It took reading "American Chica" to make me see why it was so loved by so many readers and critics coast to coast. This is ground-breaking stuff. A marvelous mirror on the new America. More important, it captures something about all of us Americans: Us mutts, mongrels, multicultured people who live on bridges of our own.

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Summary: An Important Work for Our Time
Review: Without the prompting of my book club, I would not have read American Chica, and I would have missed this honest, thoughtful and absolutely captivating insight into a bicultural family. I would have missed one of the best books that I've read this year.

I was surprised to discover how much I related to Marie Arana's experiences even though I was the daughter of two white-bread American parents. Her lush descriptions of the Peruvian gardens revived memories of my early childhood in Puerto Rico. I remembered the difficult adjustment when we moved from Puerto Rico to Canada. I wanted to shout "I'm an American!" every time I would overhear teachers and other students referring to me as the "Puerto Rican girl." I remember being embarrassed when fellow students would ask me to "say something in Spanish" and then later the culture shock when we moved to Texas and I became known as "the Canadian."

As our world becomes smaller, travel more accessible, and bicultural families more common, Arana's work becomes meaningful to all of us. The only way to counter our human inclination toward prejudice is by learning about each other and sharing our stories, the priceless gifts of our culture and experiences. I applaud Arana for her beautifully written and engaging work and for sharing this gift with us.