Achy Obejas writes stories about uprooted people. Some, like herself, are Latino immigrants and lesbians; others are men (gay and straight), people with AIDS, addicts, people living marginally, just surviving. As omniscient narrator to her characters' lives, Obejas generously delves into her own memories of exile and alienation to tell stories about women and men who struggle for wholeness and love. Obejas' title, with its jokey promise of comic cross-cultural coming-of-age mishaps, misleads. Her collection contains seven pieces--personal memoirs and essays as well as short fiction--all exploring the outsider's pain and existential angst, all shot through with irrepressible wit and dark humor, but all ultimately sadly tragic, seeing little hope of redemption or insightful change either for the specific protagonists portrayed or for men and women generally. With its population of refugees and exiles of all ilks--Cuban boat people, junkies, gays (some dying of AIDS, some not) and lesbians--the book's strongest pieces are its vignettes concerned with parts of Obejas' own life as a Latina lesbian refugee. Whether she chronicles the obsessions of a broken-hearted, jilted lover trying unsuccessfully not to circle the block of her ex-girlfriend's apartment, or the humiliation of being offered donated, unwashed clothing as part of the alternately boring and anxious "processing" into the U.S. as a political refugee from Castro's Cuba, Obejas' prose moves us. These writings of the disenfranchised are for any spiritual immigrant, huddled and yearning to be free. Whitney Scott Achy Obejas is the author of We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? and Days of Awe . She has won numerous writing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and the 1996 Studs Terkel Journalism Award. She lives in Chicago.