Thirteen-year-old Jasira wants what every girl wants: love and acceptance and the undivided attention of whoever she's with. And if she can't get that from her parents then why not from her mother's boyfriend or her father's muscle-bound neighbor Mr. Vuoso? Alicia Erian's incandescent debut novel Towelhead will ring true for readers who remember the rarely poetic transition from childhood to young adulthood. Jasira is a creature of contradiction: both innocent (reading romantic intentions into the grossest displays of lust) and oddly clear-sighted especially when it comes to the imbalance of power and the things we do for love. When her mother exiles her to Houston to live with Jasira's strict quick-to-anger Lebanese father she quickly learns what aspects of herself to suppress in front of him. In private however she conducts her sexual awakening with all the false confidence that pop culture and her neighbor's Playboy magazines have provided. Jasira tells her story with candor and glimmers of dark unexpected humor--as when she describes her mother's boyfriend Barry's assistance in her personal grooming: "A week later Barry broke down and told her the truth. That he had shaved me himself. That he had been shaving me for weeks. That he couldn't seem to stop shaving me." The freshness of her narrative voice sets Towelhead apart from the sentimental or purely harsh treatment of similar subject matter elsewhere and makes the novel a promising follow-up to Erian's well-regarded short story collection The Brutal Language of Love. --Regina Marler
