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Book Review of Playing with Boys

Playing with Boys
reviewed on + 367 more book reviews


If you thought the women in Alisa Valdes-Rodriguezs first novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club, had attitude, wait until you read her newly published Playing with Boys.Dallas Morning News Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez broke onto the scene with The Dirty Girls Social Club, a New York Times bestseller in hardcover and one of the top debut novels of 2003. Even more amazing was the response to Dirty Girls in trade paperback. Already in its 9th printing and with over 250,000 copies in print, the Dirty Girls paperback has been reaching an eager audience of young American women whose Hispanic side had been overlooked by commercial novels. In Playing with Boys, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguezs delicious new novel, three Latinas in their late twenties take Los Angeles by storm. Marcella, Olivia and Alexis have bonded not only over men but about how tough it is to make life work in L.A. Marcella is a hot young television actress, hardly able to enjoy the life shes bought for herself and certainly not enjoying her body, which is never quite perfect enough. Olivias boy is her toddler sonand shes tethered to him and to her suburban mommy track so tightly the other girls sometimes cringe. Alexis has a smart mouth and an ample body; shes a beautiful musicians manager with loads of style but about enough self-esteem to fill a Prada card case. Her complicated love affair with the casually sexy Cuban rapper Goyo is a deeply satisfying romance that will delight readers almost as much as the emotional richness and girly fun of the heroines friendship.