8 Ball Chicks

Rating:
Summary: A frightening look into the world of girl gangsters
Review:

Gini Sikes' 8 Ball Chicks is a frightening yet fascinating investigation into the world of gang girls. The book looks at girls in the black gangs of LA, among the vatos of San Antonio, and even in the American heartland of Milwaukee.

Sikes makes clear that for many girls gang banging is either a stage of adolescent rebellion or the characteristic reaction to an life filled with adversity. Indeed, the unremitting catalogue of life's horrors that the girls in the book describe can become oppressive at times for the reader to endure. The stories of rape, molestation, beatings, and abandonment begin to run together, a more horrifying story just a page away. One problem for the reader is that as she reads these stories it is easy to become desensitized to the violence and human suffering in the book. Another difficulty is keeping each girl's story distinct.

Surprisingly, the most disturbing girls in the book are a pair of well to do white teenagers who slum with gang members in a quest for teenage thrills. An obvious criticism of Sikes work is that she is little different from these girls; that Sikes is a fashionably liberal writer who parachutes into urban misery for a few weeks for a quick dance on the edge before jetting back to Manhattan.

However, Sikes comes across as an honest journalist who is brave enough to enter a world where most of us do not dare to visit, or even think about unless it comes looking for us. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Through the eyes of female gangs!
Review: Originally I was reading the book because in a play at my University, (the play was on female gangs), and needed to do a little research, but when I picked up the book and began to read, I found many more reasons not to put it down. What captured me the most about the book was the way Gini Sikes was able to give the most vivid image of gang life through that book, I have ever read. I felt like I was on those L.A. streets and in those San Antonio neighborhoods.

I believe Gini Sikes not only captured the violent side of gang life but the human side. I was able to see these people, she wrote about, as more than "gang bangers", these people had lives and were living like any other person. Overall, this book is like a documentary written down. "Cocoa" and "Alicia" were having some normal troubles in their life and in some way or another, I could relate to that. It was things like man trouble, parent trouble, and school trouble, any usual young adult will go through those things (maybe not to the extreme. In my imagination, I visualized every part of the book as if it were a film.

Last, I believe Gini Sikes was very brave for going into each neighborhood personally and seeing for herself "the life". I think this made the book a lot better and it put more feeling into the book. I don't think she would have been able to write a very affective book if she had not actually stepped into the world of gangs for a minute. In conclusion, Gini Sikes did her job in dissecting the life of female gangs through a book!

Rating:
Summary: Utterly haunting
Review: This is the best book I've read in a long time. I couldn't put it down. It was both fascinating and frightening to look into the world of girls in gangs. It's very sad how most of the time neither male gang members nor police officers see any value in the girls, most of whom are depicted as being intensely intellignet and insightful. They're a group of people who slip through the cracks, so to speak; they're neglected by social workers, police think they're worthless, and male gang members think there's nothing wrong with beating a girl, even if she's pregnant. This book shocked me.