The Dirty Girls Social Club: A Novel by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

This was the first book we all read. I have to say, I wasn’t that excited about it. Come on, ‘Dirty Girls”? And then I looked at it: the cover was all modern cutesy with horizontal multicolored stripes – very ‘Latin’. But alright, I was in, a social thing from work, and a good reason to pick up another book.

The book is divided by chapters titled with the name of the person who is narrating. The “sucias” are Lauren, Rebecca, Amber (Cuicatl), Usnavys, Sara, and Elizabeth who have been friends since college. It took me forever just to remember who the hell was who, and to top it all off, I hated Lauren, the girl that started the book. She was so bitter and couldn’t see the good in anything, so cynical. Being the only Latina in the group, everyone really wanted to know what I thought, but here’s the thing: even though Amber was from LA originally, pretty much everything else (and everyone else, for that matter) took place on the East Coast. And incase you didn’t know, West Coast Latinos are very different from East Coast Latinos. East Coast Latinos come mostly from the islands, Cuba, Puerto Rico, whereas on this side, most of us are Mexican. It makes for some big differences in language and culture. And then Amber, the West Coast representative was a cook! I wanted to like her so bad, with her Rock en Espanol and being from LA, but I almost hated her more than Lauren. She was soo Xicana, like the MEChistas that I couldn’t stand in school – no, but more. Always the martyr, suffering for centuries of oppression from the white man. Ay ay ay.

So these girls for the most part can’t stand each other, act nice when they meet up every few months, and try to have succesful careers and wonderful love lifes. I was reading gossip. What one ‘sucia’ thought of the other behind her back, what they thought about the guy she was with, etc etc. All of them have obstacles to get through (spousal abuse, record contracts, dating a black man, being a famous Latina and in the closet, being a bitter unhappy woman, and finding the love that is right in front of you), and everything ends up tying up nicely in the end. Thing is, that most of these ends, their problems, pretty much end up getting either solved by themselves or by someone else. So passive. They try to be all modern and powerful but in the end, they need rescuing.

It was a fun read once I got over the begining and things started to happen really quickly, but whenever I thought about it, I couldn’t stand these girls and that so many people would look at them and think that Latinas are really like that. The saving grace was that there was always something going on, something funny, something dramatic or ‘omg!’, so it kept me entertained and reading, but in the end, I didn’t like the book.