Quiara Alegría Hudes

From North Philly to Yale to an MFA, music to playwriting to memoir, English to Spanglish to Spanish, "Qui Qui" traces her childhood influences on her identity: her mother's activism and religion, the "Silence=Violence" of the AIDS/SIDA crisis (especially in the Puerto Rican community), her relationship with her white father and stepmother, her cousins, and her little sister, Gabi. She meditates on the inequality of why she should have access to the Sterling Library while her prima Nuchi was show more passed from grade to grade and graduated high school illiterate, and she uses the tremendous power of her unique voice.

Quotes

It felt like my life's intact boat had crashed, boards splintering off and drifting in disparate directions. It was baffling, watching parts of myself get further and further from each other. (32)

The awful scene made me wonder if I'd felt a real feeling ever and made me doubt whether I wanted to. (75)

...a turtle in a rush is a marvel to behold. (89)

My words and my world did not align. (98)

...I sensed freedom in how [Duchamp] treated virtuosity as a stepping-stone to something less rigid. (124)

...if you're fluent in a language, there's a place you belong. (127)

...this...was not everyone's America. Seeing my cousins suffer was anguish enough. Seeing the disproportionality slayed me. (135)

Quiet and secrecy, I discovered, were not always indicators of shame but were proven strategies of resilience and resistance. (163)

Narrative armor, safe places to land, instructions for survival sent to future generations. That is, if we in the future could decode them. (230)

Truth being: the divide [between Yale's affluence and North Philly's scarcity] was where I had made my home.Until I became a bridge, if such a reconciliation was possible, there would be no peace. (231)

English was not simply a language, but a betterment project. (240)

But had [music], would it ever, bring me closer to myself? Can a haven, in fact, ever do that? (256)

It was the notion that no single hemisphere or address wore an aesthetic crown, that the task was to put one's world onstage. (278)

Find your fellow travelers....When a door opens for you, bring another person through. -Paula Vogel (280) show less

I was lucky enough to catch Quiara Alegría Hudes' "My Broken Language" on stage a few years ago and fell in love with her storytelling and the depth and nuance of her characters. The White Hot is similarly gorgeous and rich, drawing the reader into April Soto's carefully guarded interior life, as she explores it for the first time and shares her discoveries, big and small, with lush, visceral narration. It's a nesting doll novel, the prose holding a play wrapped around a heart of poetry. show more [Review copy received from from Netgalley/PRH; review based on audiobook edition.] show less

I read this for One Book One Philadelphia back when we first moved to Philly. I love this book so much that even though I have a copy of it. I grab every copy I find and pass them on to new readers. it is a wonderful story of a life, and the lives that surround it. I can't believe I didn't journal it back when I first read it.

This book was amazing. It was a whirlwind of what the author's life has been like yet it captured much of what I went through. I often found little gems of wisdom in the characters' words and was compelled to write them down and/or commit them to memory. You will love this book no my your ethnic race but as a Latinx I think perhaps we might feel it a different way but that is just me. Hudes does an excellent job of weaving together traditions, food, music, sayings, and life experienced as a show more generation brought here to the US or one that was born here but your parents were not. Take the time to walk this journey of the author's memories and enjoy. show less