Island of Bones: Essays (American Lives)

What is €œidentity€ when you€re a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovah€s Witnesses? The answer isn€t easy. You won€t find it in books. And you certainly won€t find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy Castro€s unmoored life of searching and striving that she€s turned to account with literary alchemy in Island of Bones. 

In personal essays that plumb the depths of not-belonging, Castro takes the all-too-raw materials of her adolescence and young adulthood and views them through the prism of time. The result is an exquisitely rendered, richly detailed perspective on a uniquely troubled young life that reflects on the larger questions each of us faces in a world where diversity and singularity are forever at odds. In the experiences of her past€"hunger and abuse, flight as a fourteen-year-old runaway, single motherhood, the revelations of her €œtrue€ ethnic identity, the suicide of her father€"Castro finds the €œjagged, smashed place of edges and fragments€ that she pieces together to create an island all her own. Hers is a complicated but very real depiction of what it is to €œjump class,€ to not belong but to find one€s voice in the interstices of identity.