Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter by Carmen Aguirre (Douglas & McIntyre)
Being a teenager can be difficult. Being a teenager groomed to become a South American revolutionary is something altogether different. That was the experience of Vancouver’s Carmen Aguirre, whose mother spirited her and her younger sister, Ale, off to a safe house in La Paz, Bolivia, to join the resistance against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Aguirre, a playwright, has crafted a narrative packed with suspense, emotion, and dollops of sardonic humour. Even better, her searing memoir conveys the confusion and heartache of adolescence alongside the violent upheavals of Latin America during the late 1970s. The monotony of high school, and the emotional tug of boys and pop music, abut the roiling politics of a region on the verge of conflagration. Never polemical or self-pitying, Aguirre has written a crisp, dramatic account of growing up under extraordinary circumstances.
