![]() ![]() Ortiz-in spite of her literary background-is not concerned with creating a work of art: her style is plain, undistinguished. All the while, the reader keeps wondering, “When and how is Ivers going to get caught?” These passages, beautifully interspersed with her adolescent tale, shed light on the person she has become, and also function as brief pauses following cliffhangers, enhancing the book’s atmosphere of danger and foreboding. Alongside the main story of her teenage years, Ortiz has added vignettes from her personal and professional life as an adult, including her work with at-risk youth. ![]() She has published both poetry and prose (including an essay in the “Modern Love” series in The New York Times) and is the founder and curator of Los Angeles’s Rhapsodomancy Reading Series. It is a relationship on which the author has had plenty of time to reflect: now in her forties, she works as a therapist in her native southern California. The memoir is remarkable not just for its taboo subject, but also for the matter-of-fact tone Ortiz takes as she tells about her most unusual relationship. ![]() Ivers, and how he carried on an affair with her over the next several years. It chronicles how the author, as a middle school student back in the mid 1980s, was seduced by her English teacher, Mr. Wendy Ortiz’s memoir, Excavation, is an outstanding first book. ![]()
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