About the Author:
CARMEN AGUIRRE is a Vancouver-based writer and theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written or co-written 20 plays, including The Refugee Hotel, which was nominated for a 2010 Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play. Her most recent one-woman show is Blue Box. Aguirre has 60 film, TV and stage acting credits, including lead roles in the Showcase series Endgame andQuinceañera, winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Something Fierce won Canada Reads in 2012, was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize, and was a #1 National Bestseller.
From Booklist:
Revolution equals “terror. Paranoia.” So writes Aguirre as she tells the story of her family’s escape from Chile and the 1975 Pinochet-led coup and her growing up with other exiled underground revolutionaries in Canada. In 1979, “The Year of the Return,” they relocated to La Paz, which her skillful descriptions bring to life: “Every thief in Bolivia was here . . . to rip people’s pockets and purses open . . . and were robbing everybody: skin-kneed believers, nuns.” And the plaza with “the bustle of beggars, office workers and businessmen, and Indian women selling dried-up llama fetuses and kiosks displaying beautiful cards of carved bronze and wood and silver.” There the exiled family leads double lives while assisting Chilean blacklisted politicians and other resistors “from the concentration camps with their scars and broken bodies.” With Chile still under Pinochet’s brutal reign, Aguirre flees to Vancouver in 1989, the revolution lost. A stirring account of a revolutionary’s girlhood. --Whitney Scott
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