Towelhead
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The story of a girl failed by her parents and by a conflicted America, Towelhead is an ultimately redemptive and moving work that no one can afford to ignore.
The year is 1991. When Jasira's mother finds out what has been going on between her boyfriend and her thirteen-year-old daughter, she has to make a choice—and chooses to send Jasira off to Houston, Texas, to live with her father.
A remote disciplinarian prone to explosive rages, Jasira's father is unable to show his daughter the love she craves—and far less able to handle her feelings about her changing body.
Bewildered by extremes of parental scrutiny and neglect, Jasira begins to look elsewhere for affection, but Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait, and high school has become a lonely place for a "towelhead." When her father meets, and forbids her to see, her boyfriend, it becomes lonelier still.
But there is always Mr. Vuoso -- a neighboring army reservist whose son Jasira babysits. Mr. Vuoso, as Jasira discovers, has an extensive collection of Playboy magazines. And he doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with Jasira's body at all.
Painfully funny, tender, and sexually charged, Towelhead is that rare thing: a gloriously readable novel unafraid to take risks.
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.
