by Sonia Manzano
Hennepin County Library audiobook 7 discs
read by the author
genre: non-fiction memoir
Her memoir of her early life (until young twenties) is told in three parts. The first part was very confusing - is she two? four? six? It's hard to not have context for her storytelling not knowing her age. In her early life, she makes the observation that "boys are better than girls" when her brother Joe is born. It's kind of amazing that she grew up to be such a strong woman with the social environment she had.
I hated the part when her teacher was ridiculing little Sonia for bringing sheets of TP instead of a "real" tissue or handkerchief. Who ridicules a small child for being poor?! Then her principal blames her when boys are trying to attack her on the playground . . . appalling.
Manzano's voice was a little off-putting to me. It was a weird mix of Sesame Street style articulation and overpronunciation with teenage theatricality without finesse. I'm not sure who she saw as her target audience for this. As a child, she was definitely day-dreamy, clueless, and a bit of a drama queen.
Her half-aunt tries to push her into a salvation decision when she's young and doesn't even understand what she's being asked to do. When she tells her mom, her mom says "Catholics only confess to priests" and starts her in catechism classes. Ugh!
I *love* the part where her older half-sister tells her to read the signs on the bus by herself . . . and she does! I love that discovery of reading.
Again with the crummy teachers . . . Mrs. Whitman tells the second graders during Brotherhood Week that there are three kinds of people: white, yellow, and black. It gets worse from there.
When her teacher in middle school, Mrs. Pellman, took her and two other girls to see West Side Story (the movie), it was a transformative event for her. That experience opened her up to the power of theatre! She ended up going to a performing arts high school and then Carnegie Mellon University. She was part of the original cast of Godspell (as it was developed by students at CMU) and went off-Broadway with it. Then she was cast in Sesame Street. What an incredible story; what an incredible woman.
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2 comments:
Thank you! I thought I was missing something while reading the first part of the book. Had to re-read a couple of times, didn't know if author was the young child or the child coming into the house. Also didn't understand why the older child came into the house.
Would have liked if book continued after her audition for Sesame Street. Did she finally come to value herself?
I looked at her webpage and some other autobiographical info online. She really became a strong advocate for women, latinos, and children. I was surprised at how this book seemed to gloss over how she made the transition from college student in Godspell to Maria on Sesame Street.
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