THE DIRTY GIRLS SOCIAL CLUB

A journalist employs the conceit of female friendship in a predictable but affecting debut that takes a long, hard, and funny look at life in the US for Latina women.

Here come the sucias (translation: dirty girls)! Six irreverent, successful, determined, in-your-face chicas who joined forces in college and continue to get together twice a year in Boston to compare notes on life and love. It’s their tenth anniversary, and they run the gamut from magazine founder and editor to not-so-happy Miami housewife and mother of two; from bulimic to large and loving it. The sucias are loyal friends, but they all have secrets—a laundry list of universal female issues with an ethnic twist that they’ll reveal to the reader and slowly to each other. They’re all different in background, style, attitude, color, sexual proclivity, ambition, and fluency in Spanish. They take turns speaking, in rotating chapters, and we follow them through their relationships with each other (they aren’t all equally friendly), their relationships with men (married, cheating, abusive, unsavory), their upbringings (prim Catholic New Mexico pilgrim, Cuban gentry, dirt-poor in Columbia), their careers (TV anchor, newspaper reporter, rock singer), and their reactions to stereotyping. “If Hollywood pretends we all look like Penelope Cruz and J.Lo, the Latin media pretends we are all like a Swedish exchange student or Pamela Anderson,” says Lauren Fernandez, the Boston Gazette’s first and only Hispanic columnist, hired by her white-shoe Harvard-educated boss, Chuck Spring,“ to connect to the Latina people or whatever.”

An upscale telenovela with well-drawn, charmingly flawed characters from an author who explodes some myths (while cementing others). The aforementioned J.Lo is reportedly involved in development talks. Surprised?