A review by stanro
My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes

challenging emotional funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.0

This starts as a simple tale of a growing child, whose Peurto Rican mother and Jewish father move from Philadelphia to a farm, and then back (without the father) when the marriage ends. Philadelphia is not a place that has appeared much in my reading, and I’m liking being there in this way. 

The book is drifting by me pleasantly enough, though as a mainly “serious” reader I’m wondering how this so rapidly scaled  the heights of my TBR, when I’m arrested by a tale of … I don’t want to spoil it … but it shocks and appals me and concerns the author’s Peurto Rican grandmother. This, together with the closely preceding references to the mother’s union and community building activity, means I’m getting hooked 😀. 

Quiara’s mother goes through a spiritual transformation - really a return to roots. And Quiaria faces the question, to approach or retreat from her mother’s spiritual activities. 

Quiaría also questions who she is, using facility in language, or lack of it, as a marker. At one point she places herself thus: “English, halting Spanish and advanced conversational Du Champs …”

This is the story in first person of the writer of the musical The Heights, performed in many countries, and how she was made into the person who could write it. 

Despite her excited description of meeting Paula Vogel, a playwright enthusiastically and successfully running an academic postgraduate course at a significant US University, I found I lost interest in its following stages for a while. 

But late in the book there is a joyous song to the variety of her female relatives’ naked bodies and then some critique of mainstream female idealisation. And through it all is the recurring losses amongst family that she so sadly experiences. Worth the ride!  4⭐️  #areadersjourney