![]() All too soon, “the fevered rub of hips against the floor, the burn of carpet through clothes, the clenching of toes” will mean young Wendy’s undoing (29). All too soon, he’ll be “pressing his hardness against and licking thighs, then clit” (23). Pages later, his eyes meet hers, and a thirteen-year-old Wendy is biting her lip (15). “Chalk dust scattered away from him like an aura,” she writes (11). It is by way of simile that Ortiz introduces us to the man who strips her of her naiveté. Whether it’s the temporal distance that gives her this perspective (a forty-something Ortiz is far from her adolescent self) or her background in psychology (she holds an MA in clinical psychology), we the readers relish the connections she deftly makes and the brave insights she offers through the hindsight perspective and a strategic sampling of literary devices. Ortiz’s writing is rife with figurative language like simile, metaphor, personification, parallel structure, alliteration, and repetition, but it is also incredibly self-reflective. ![]() ![]() Ortiz writes about her loss of innocence in her debut memoir Excavation, which has received rave reviews since its 2014 release. ![]()
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