OTHER GIRLS LIKE Me BY STEPHANIE DAVIES
Paperback published by blink books 1st September 2020
Till now, Stephanie has done her best to play by the rules which seem to be stacked against girls like her. It doesn’t help that she wants to play football, dress like a boy, and fight apartheid in South Africa despite living in rural middle England as she struggles to find her voice in a world where everything is different for girls.
Then she hears them on the radio. Greenham women an irreverent group of lesbians, punks rockers, mothers, and activists who have set up camp outside a US military base to protect nuclear war are calling for backups in the face of imminent eviction from their muddy ⛺️. She heads there immediately, where a series of adventures from a break in to a nuclear research centre to doomed love affair with a punk rock singer in a girl 👧 band changes the course has found is challenged when she faces tragedy at home 🏠.
A lyrical, fluent and elegant read it’s also funny 😄 and poignant in equal measure. In the pre Greta Thunberg era, this personal account of one young woman’s 👩 journey into activism is captivating and compelling and a salient reminder of how power and solidarity of communities of people with shared values can shape and change our lives for good.
Other Girls Like Me is funny sad, powerful and inspirational, especially in these times that are calling for all of us to become activists.
Part of chapter one
FREE NELSON MANDELA THE SPECIALS
A CHILDHOOD IN St Mary Bourne an English village of thatched roof cottages winding along the banks of the Bourne River with its swaying water weeds, frogspawn, and fluttering ducks 🦆 was a childhood filled with wonders. I waded through fresh water as the river rose anew from its barren bed each spring swung across the river on tyres attached to ropes on summer nights warmed my hands hand 🖐 at autumn 🍂 bonfires 🔥 on golden evenings and rolled in deep snow banks in winter 🥶. My family of six lived at the edge of a village behind the flint schoolhouse adjacent to the primary school 🏫 that my three siblings and I attended. There were eleven pupils in my year, with funny last names, like Bone and Strange and Gibbons. We arrived in this peculiar land for the industrial north when I was six, my sister Kate was nine, my brother, Robert, was four, with baby 👶 Sarah arriving not long after we did, bundled out of the ambulance 🚑 one November afternoon and bustled into the bright kitchen for us to peer in curiosity. People thought our Northern accents strange, but we soon lost them and became posh instead, never catching the lilting Hampshire accent that was no different from any I had ever heard.
Everything was different here. No lorries 🚛 or buses 🚌 rumbled passed our front door 🚪, but instead there were fields and birds 🦅 and horses 🐎 wherever I looked, accompanied by the soothing sound of wood pigeons, hidden in trees 🌲. I lost myself in books 📖 and played classical guitar 🎸 in the privacy of my attic bedroom 🛏. It’s slanted skylight revealing the stars ⭐️ moon 🌓 and clouds ☁️ in the changing sky. One evening at dusk, I watched spellbound from my bedroom window as two steaming bulls locked horns on the hill behind our house, the air visible from the flaring nostrils as they snorted and pounded the ground, the dust flying. My father had landed a new job in what seemed like paradise.
I BECAME AN activist though not a feminist with the blessing of the patriarchy or at least of my father.
My review
The Guarding newspaper her dad had just finished gave her the newspaper to read. She loved to follow current events. Something upset her on the front of the newspaper was a photograph of a teenager, his body bloody and limp, in the arms of a young man wearing denim dungarees who was racing towards the camera, desperate to find help.
MY FAVOURITE LINE
I love riding to school on the back of her fathers BMW750. When we arrived, I quickly hurried away from him. I didn’t want to bring attention to the fact that I was the headmaster’s daughter.
I would like to thank @midaspr for sending me this memoir to read and review and for very kindly inviting me to be part of the blog tour today.
ABOUT STEPHANIE DAVIES
Stephanie Davies is a writer who worked for many years in communications for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers in the United States. A UK native. Stephanie moved to New York in 1991, where she taught English Composition at Long Island University in Brooklyn and led research trips to Cuba. Before moving to New York, she co edited a grassroots LGBTQ magazine in Brighton called A Queer Tribe. Stephanie earned a teaching degree from Aberystwyth University, in Wales and a BA in European Studies from Bath University, England. She grew up St. Mary Bourne, a small village in Hampshire. Today, Stephanie divides her time between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley, New York where she lives with her wife, Bea, and rescue dog . Emma Peel.
Visit Stephanie on http://www.stephanie- davies.com
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