Something Fierce - Softcover

Aguirre, Carmen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846272025 ISBN 13: 9781846272028

Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd, 2012

Synopsis

One minute, 11-year-old Carmen is watching her hippy mum put curlers in for the first time, the next she is being dragged with her sister through LA airport with her mother muttering about 'the patriarchy' under her breath. The three of them board a plane that takes them to Peru, next door to the Chile from which the family had fled after Pinochet's coup. Eight days after landing in Lima, and still perplexed by their mother's disguises and lies, they're off again, on a bus bound they know not where. They are then to spend most of the next decade, the 1980s, moving from dictatorship to dictatorship, evading capture, torture and peril at every turn. It is no way to spend your teenage years, until, overnight, it becomes the way Carmen herself chooses.

About this title

About the Author:

CARMEN AGUIRRE is a Vancouver-based writer and theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written or co-written 20 plays, including The Refugee Hotel, which was nominated for a 2010 Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play. Her most recent one-woman show is Blue Box. Aguirre has 60 film, TV and stage acting credits, including lead roles in the Showcase series Endgame andQuinceañera, winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Something Fierce won Canada Reads in 2012, was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize, and was a #1 National Bestseller.

From Booklist:

Revolution equals “terror. Paranoia.” So writes Aguirre as she tells the story of her family’s escape from Chile and the 1975 Pinochet-led coup and her growing up with other exiled underground revolutionaries in Canada. In 1979, “The Year of the Return,” they relocated to La Paz, which her skillful descriptions bring to life: “Every thief in Bolivia was here . . . to rip people’s pockets and purses open . . . and were robbing everybody: skin-kneed believers, nuns.” And the plaza with “the bustle of beggars, office workers and businessmen, and Indian women selling dried-up llama fetuses and kiosks displaying beautiful cards of carved bronze and wood and silver.” There the exiled family leads double lives while assisting Chilean blacklisted politicians and other resistors “from the concentration camps with their scars and broken bodies.” With Chile still under Pinochet’s brutal reign, Aguirre flees to Vancouver in 1989, the revolution lost. A stirring account of a revolutionary’s girlhood. --Whitney Scott

About this edition

• Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1846272025
• ISBN 13: 9781846272028
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277