While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Diaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Diaz triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. With a story reminiscent of Tara Westover's Educated, Roxane Gay's Hunger, and Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries, Jaquira Diaz delivers a memoir that reads as electrically as a novel.