My Broken Language: A Memoir
Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio—even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories—but first she’d have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She’d have to find her language. Weaving together Hudes’s love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a multimythic dive into home, memory, and belonging—narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.
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Community Reviews
I wanted to love this one more. There were many spots in the story that I connected with, but on the flip side I was never really grabbed by this book. I think my favorite part of this book was towards the end when the main character starts writing about her family's experiences, particularly with AIDS and the things that were unspoken of at that time. I wish that the writing was more fluid, but I found myself lost sometimes in what was currently happening and what was a flashback.
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