Dole, Mayra Lazara - Down to the Bone

[oyceter]

Laura Amores is kicked out of Catholic school when a nun finds a note sent to her from her girlfriend, Marlena. She's then kicked out of the house by her mother. She manages to find shelter with her best friend Soli, and she spends most of the book trying to figure out her sexuality and what communities she wants to belong to.

Like much of coming-of-age YA, the storyline is not the most original, but Lauri's voice is very lively, and I love how Dole populates her book with Latin@s of all kinds. And I really love that there is an important POC/POC interracial friendship (Soli is black)! Dole also includes genderqueer characters, a few mentions of drag queens, and transgendered characters, although the central conflict still revolves around Laura identifying as a lesbian or not.

Some of the conflicts are rather obvious for the genre—there's the encounter with the homophobe, the boyfriend, the non-accepting family—and Dole doesn't always deal with them in ways that make them more than their outlines. Lauri's voice also doesn't always work for me, but I suspect that's because I'm pretty far from being a Latina lesbian teen in Miami. Still, the book feels very now and very alive, and I really love the communities Dole portrays in the book.

I'm looking forward to what Dole does next; I think she has a good voice and would love to see her tackle less common storylines.

Copy won from Color Online. Many thanks!

Comments

[gair]

Erk - I think I must have completely missed this moment in the book. In my comment above, I just meant that I thought the way the protagonist's sexuality was treated wasn't biphobic - ie that the author had managed to talk about the way that you can experience some kind of desire for boys while remaining emotionally-sexually-romantically oriented exclusively towards women, without insisting that monosexuality is normal or superior or compulsory. But that sort of only works if there aren't any biphobic moments in the book more generally, so thanks for the heads-up - I totally agree with you about this:

whenever any character voices a common and socially-acceptable bigotry and no other voice opposes (which is often the form of biphobia in lesbian communities) I take offense.

At least I do when I notice it, obviously - but I know I need to work on raising my awareness of biphobia.