A review by zlibrarian
Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

5.0

It’s not easy to explain, but this book feels alive. Excellent, poignant, and memorable. Piepzna-Samarasinha beautifully captures the inner and outer environments of life, love, and learning in queer communities of color and the world. Her vivid descriptive style appeals to the senses, making one want to reach for a blanket while reading about a coatless Toronto winter. At other times, you can feel yourself dancing or falling in love. Anyone who has lived through similar experiences during the era she describes will remember the close link between personal and political struggles, and how people lived it instead of just talking about it. She also handles complex, painful family relationships honestly, listening between her parents’ words to hear the things they won’t -- or can’t -- say. This valuable historical perspective makes this more than a coming-of-age novel. A more appropriate term, to borrow from Audre Lorde's ZAMI, would be 'biomythography'. This isn't to question the veracity of DIRTY RIVER, rather to praise it and try to describe it power and depth. Throughout the book, Piepzna-Samarasinha depicts the changing realities of living between cultures: not fully accepted as South Asian among Toronto’s queer communities, but finally defining her identity and thriving in communities that are as brilliantly diverse as the real world itself. As a librarian, I’d recommend this to faculty and students of English, Creative Writing, Gender and Women’s Studies, and perhaps History and Politics too. Have already requested purchase. Highly recommended.