Manuela Azul has special eyes. Eyes that her mother made her hide behind sunglasses. Raised in Miami to a single Argentine mother, Manu dreamed of theManuela Azul has special eyes. Eyes that her mother made her hide behind sunglasses. Raised in Miami to a single Argentine mother, Manu dreamed of the day when she would be a U.S. citizen and the end of her almost 17 years of hiding. But when her "grandmother" was injured and mother taken away by ICE, Manu was left to fend for herself for the first time in her life. A life she understood almost nothing about.
On the surface, Lobizona is a fantasy novel about undocumented immigrants, but in truth, it is so, so much more than that. This book belongs to all immigrants, biracial people, feminists, queers, and every fighter who believes in equality. I don't think I've ever read anything where all these identities blend so well into a single story. Garber certainly did that, and it blew me away.
Sometimes reality strays so far from what’s rational that we can only explain it through fantasy.
I expected this book to be good, but I didn't anticipate it to be absolutely breathtaking. Manu, Saysa (I love Saysa), Tiago, Cata, and all their friends are extremely loveable characters with their own beliefs, ideologies, as well as flaws and insecurities. They are a force of change as they join each other to fight for equality. To fight for liberation from their cages.
“[W]hy settle for being a son of the system, when you can mother a movement?” – Saysa
Lobizona is one of the best novels on people who were supposed to belong but deemed otherwise by law. It is a book on being utterly undocumented, on feminism, on queer rights, on equality, and on fighting back. It is a revolution under the guise of fantasy, rooted in love and stretching into every injustice. Very well-written and well-thought-out, Lobizona is undoubtedly a YA no one should miss out on. [13 Apr 2020]
I received an e-ARC from Wednesday Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review....more
// tl; dr: compelling arguments of male dominance leading to biased data and therefore everything is against women (and i would say against all minori// tl; dr: compelling arguments of male dominance leading to biased data and therefore everything is against women (and i would say against all minority groups too), but not acknowledging non-cis ppl at all while analyzing within gender stereotypes did bother me and might be triggering to some
Content warnings: description of sexual assault (including rape), sexual harassment, violence, blood, poisonous chemicals, gaslighting, gender stereotypes, mention of racism, mention of “correctional” rape
Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.
This book talks about statistics and history, and in both realms, queer people are inherently invisible. If we were to read this thinking how little if at all it addresses non-hetero couples, trans people, gender non-binary people, etc., it would be painful. So, just for now, let’s read it as a book about cis(het) men and cis(het) women. Under this assumption, Invisible Women is an excellent book on gender inequality caused by (cishet) men being defaults.
Oftentimes, when I read nonfiction, I try to argue from another perspective to see if the theories still stand. For Invisible Women, I couldn’t, because there is no other side. The overlooking of women’s unpaid work, lower temperature in air-conditioned room to suit men’s higher body temperature, larger tools that fit men’s hands, lack of female representation in traditionally male environments, etc. are so prevalent in our daily lives. And I love that Criado Pérez also used economic arguments to show that investing in research and infrastructures that acknowledge and close gender gaps will, in the long run, save money.
In Invisible Women, we don’t just learn about bias against women. We learn about biases, that are not-so mysteriously, disproportionally affecting women. The same biases, I am sure, disproportionally affects other minority groups, too, in both similar and different ways.
You couldn’t not be angry while reading this book. It is undoubtedly well-researched and well-thought out, but I couldn’t love it. How could I when I hated that this book had to exist in the first place? While I still find it somewhat questionable to not mention non-cis folx (especially with the theme of gender, sex, and anatomy) in author’s note nor include disclaimers about the role gender stereotypes play here, the majority of what Criado Pérez had pointed out was incredibly important yet easily overlooked and Invisible Women is overall a very informative read.
For the final few chapters, I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author. She exuded such passion (and spoke quite fast) that I wished I had listened to the book in whole instead of reading most of it from my physical copy....more
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