Review of My life uncensored

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Abi McCoy
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Review of My life uncensored

Post by Abi McCoy »

[Following is a volunteer review of "My life uncensored" by Cristina Caymares.]
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3 out of 4 stars
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My Life Uncensored by Cristina Caymares is an honest, rugged autobiography of the author's early life. This book is divided into four short chapters. The first chapter introduces her family in Miami and Los Angeles. She examines her relationship with her extended family in Los Angeles and how visiting them with her sister often affected her relationship with her mother in Miami. In the second chapter, Caymares reminisces about her grandfather, Pipo. He was in jail for most of her life, which she notes “wasn’t because he was a bad person, he was just addicted to making money.” Although she didn’t have a traditional relationship with her grandfather, they did talk on the phone almost every day.

The next chapter focuses on her mother, the many men her mother was involved with, and then delves into some of Caymares' own early relationships. She discusses how her sister and she used to love pretending to be their mother, which involved dressing up, finding a husband, and then finding another husband because their pretend spouses would always die. The final chapter is about her grandmother who came to Miami when she was 50. Her mother and her grandmother were always at odds since Caymares’ grandmother took them church.

I found the last two chapters to be the most emotionally raw and insightful. In the third chapter, the reader gets to see how Caymares’ early relationships in middle school parodied her mother’s relationships. She remembers telling one of her boyfriends that he was “such a little girl” when he was being emotionally vulnerable, something her mother repeatedly told her and her sister growing up. When she is discussing the tug of war she felt between loving her grandmother and respecting her mother in the fourth chapter, I could really feel the pain of trying to reconcile those feelings as a young girl. She did an excellent job at emphasizing the way that her negative interactions with her family affected her relationships outside of the family as well as how they shaped her way of thinking.

There were only a couple technical errors in this work. However, there were many cases of awkward phrasing and wording that were difficult to understand. I also felt that some portions of the book were written in more of a stream of conscious style, which interrupted the flow of the narrative. This was a very short work, which led to me wanting more in certain places; more detail could have been added in several places to make the story more engaging. I believe this work could use a thorough editing to smooth out these areas.

Overall, I’m rating My Life Uncensored by Cristina Caymares a 3 out of 4 stars. This was an insightful, emotionally raw work that I enjoyed reading. However, I did find that the work could use some more editing to get rid of awkward wording as well as the portions of the story that interrupt the narrative’s style. This work would be great for people who like autobiographies, memoirs focusing on emotional and psychological themes, and stories about family drama and relationships.

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My life uncensored
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Rm21
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Post by Rm21 »

this sounds like a bit of a dark read, it is sad that the author had to go through so much. i might skip this work just because it's so intense.
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