Towelhead
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Funny, disturbing, completely compelling, TOWELHEAD was picked as a New York Times Notable Book of 2005.
Jasira, a teenaged Arab-American girl, is sent away by her mother to live with her father, after the mother's boyfriend begins paying her too much attention. But Jasira's father is unable to show her the affection she craves, or to handle her feelings about her rapidly changing body. America is about to go to war in Kuwait, and Jasira becomes ever more isolated at school, and begins to look for love in all the wrong places. Mr Vuoso, a neighbour and army reservist who catches her looking at his copy of Playboy while she is babysitting his son, is quick to take advantage of her vulnerability. Things look very bad for Jasira until a pregnant neighbour, Melina, offers her a lifeline, and in the novel's hilarious, and heartbreaking climax, manages to bring father and daughter, finally, a little closer to one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Erian (The Brutal Language of Love) takes a dogged, unflinching look at what happens as a young woman's sexuality blooms when only a predatory neighbor is paying attention. After 13-year-old Jasira is sent to live with her father in Houston ("I didn't want to live with Daddy. He had a weird accent and came from Lebanon"), she finds herself coming of age in the shadow of his old world, authoritarian ideas, which include a ban on tampons (they're for married women, he insists) and a friendship with a boy who's black. Trapped between her father's rigidity and a wider culture that seems without rules, Jasira is left to handle puberty on her own, as well as her budding sexual desire and an ongoing longing for love and acceptance. Her creepy neighbor, Mr. Vuoso, senses her desires, and she responds eagerly to his sexual overtures. His willingness to eroticize her is heightened by how exotic as well as distasteful he finds her, a half Middle Eastern child living in America on the eve of the first Gulf War. He hires Jasira to baby-sit for his son, and it's clear that their relationship will destroy them. The writing is not subtle indeed, it can be quite clunky but as a meditation on race, adolescence and alienation, the novel has moments of power.
