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Amazon.com Review
The Dirty Girls Social Club closely resembles Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale: a handful of young women seek real love and job satisfaction. Unlike McMillan, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has completely thrown out any literary pretensions whatsoever, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Dirty Girls is a fun, easy, ultimately charming read, not least because the girls themselves are so appealing. Six Latina women become fast friends at Boston University and thereafter meet as a group every few months. Now in their late twenties, they're each on the cusp of the life they want. The novel is narrated in turn by each woman. Feisty Lauren has a column at the Boston Globe, but can't help falling for losers; ghetto-elegant Usnavys is trying to find a man to match her own earning power and expensive tastes; uptight Rebecca is a successful magazine publisher and an unsuccessful wife; beautiful TV anchor Elizabeth has a secret; Sara leads a Martha-Stewart-perfect life as a homemaker; and Amber is a hopeful rock musician in L.A. The novel works because Valdes-Rodriguez has compassion for her characters; each is faulted, but none is culpable. She also has an eye for the telling detail, as when Rebecca tries to befriend her white husband's stuffy family: "His sister took step classes with me and we shopped for clothes together on Newbury Street and went to the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum one afternoon with Au Bon Pain sandwiches in our handbags." Something about those sandwiches makes the whole enterprise seem more poignant. On the down side, Valdes-Rodriguez is so eager to make things work out for her ladies, her writing sometimes beggars belief. Men actually say things like "Swear to me you're happily married, and I'll stop pursuing you." Yes, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is, in fact, the Latina Terry McMillan. That is, if McMillan were a slighty guiltier pleasure. --Claire Dederer
Product Description
It is the story of six very different women who met at college in Boston and swore to be friends for the rest of their lives. They call themselves the Dirty Girls Social Club. The only obvious thing they have in common is that they are all professional women and Latin American, but the real thing about them is that their lives tap into universal truths about women and sisterhood. There is Lauren, a journalist, who is used to getting what she wants and kicking ass when she doesn't, except when it comes to men- Sara, wife of a corporate lawyer, upstanding member of the Jewish community, one of the best interior designers and party givers around, and seriously uptight...Elizabeth, the beautiful co-host for a TV morning show and former runway model with a secret which will test the bonds of their friendship to the limit - Rebecca, owner and founder of the most popular Hispanic woman's magazine in the market; nobody works the room like she does...Amber, a rock singer waiting for her first big break, the spiritual one of the group...And then there is Usnavys, a big gal who is as showy as Liberace; no-one would guess, meeting her for the first time in her full-length white fur coat with the price tag still on the inside, that she is Vice President for Public Affairs for the United Way of Massachusetts. They all feel perfectly licensed to tell each other what do and how to live their lives, and boy do they ever.
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