✨ Review ✨ American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous by Deborah Paredez

Thanks to W. W. Norton & Company and #netgalley for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

This is a hard one for me to review because there are things I absolutely adored about this book and things I really struggled with. Overall, like it's title, I found it to be "extraordinary, unruly, fabulous."

Things I loved:
⭕️ the discussions about what a diva was and how it changed over time
⭕️ some of the chapter focuses - her aunt, Tina Turner, the Williams sisters, Rita Moreno - were so much fun to read + the personal memoir pieces made it clear the weight these women had in her life
⭕️ historic contextualization of divadom
⭕️ The San Antonio theater references, especially in her first chapter about her aunt
⭕️ memoir tidbits were a lot of fun - e.g. around her salsa dancing, which helped connect her life to the larger story

Things I struggled with:
⭕️ the narrative structure was unusual and it all felt a little too unruly to follow along at times -- sometimes I could embrace this as diva style at its best, but sometimes it felt a little overwhelming. I think it wasn't always accessible and some of this is me as an outsider looking in.
⭕️ along with that, I struggled sometimes juggling the multiple through lines of a chapter (especially the Aretha Franklin chapter) where there was a biographical narrative, personal narrative, cultural critique, and more running through it all.

Overall I love that this made me think and better appreciate divas!