Reviews for A Woman’s Story

Read the review on Midwest Book Review’s website: http://www.midwestbookreview.com/rbw/jun_22.htm#margaretlane

“Smiley and the Laughing Girl” By Francine Rodriguez WHY WE LIKE IT: We love Rodriguez’s honest, down to earth, totally unaffected style and her deep investment in her characters. The story falls under the classification of ‘dirty realism’ (with a feminist slant) but in the end it resists any kind of definition. All we can call it is ‘good writing’.

—Fleas On The Dog, Vol 7

Wow! Once again author Francine Rodriguez proves that she is the eyes and ears of Latina Realism. Her series of short stories in A Woman’s Story draws on her inner-city life experiences, revealing extraordinarily provocative vignettes of love, sex, violence, and injustice. Francine’s vivid descriptions of the lives of women as heroines and as victims stir all one’s emotions. My soul is aroused by her captivating imagination portrayed in the half-fiction, half real-life personalities. ¡Bien hecho!

—Rocky Barilla, International Society of Latino Authors, author of Esmerelda

Through a brutally honest approach, Rodriguez’s words guide you on a timely and unfiltered expedition of the contemporary social landscapes Latinx women traverse in the U.S. in the early 2000s. Her writings explore the delicate and very real balancing act they must display being the human at the center of frenzied collisions in culture, community, socio-economics, sexuality, and gender. Often gentle, and painful, the intensity of her stories shine through with the same intensity with which Latinx women must face society in today’s America.

—Nikolas Gonzales, World History Adj. Professor, World History Department- Bunker Hill Community College, and author of Moraga Deconstructed: Illuminations in Mexican-American Heritage

In a unique and unlikely feminist reclaiming of dirty realism, Francine Rodriguez’s A Woman’s Story takes us on an intimate yet dystopian journey into the effects and innerworkings of identity-based marginalization. … These silenced memories give us insight into many other Herstories and truths that may never be known not only because they were once forbidden, but because they are still mostly inaccessible to a mass U.S. American audience.

—Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Ph.D., Associate Professor – Decolonial Media Studies Department of Communication Studies, CSU San Bernardino

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