How do you live in Algeria when you grow up speaking French, with a French mother? How do you live in France when you've spent your childhood in Algeria with an Algerian father? Tomboy is the story of a girl whose father calls her Brio, whose alter ego is Amine, and whose mother is a blue-eyed blond. But who is she? Born five years after Algerian independence in 1967, she navigates the cultural, emotional, and linguistic boundaries of identity living in a world that doesn't seem to recognize her. In this semiautobiographical novel, the young French Algerian author Nina Bouraoui introduces us to a girl who feels that Algeria is the country of men. Her childhood years spent in Algeria lead her to explore the borderland between genders as she tries to find her balance between nations, races, and identities. With prose modeling the rhythm of the seasons and the sea, Tomboy enters the innermost reality of a life lived on the edge of several cultures.

Navigates the cultural, emotional, and linguistic boundaries of identity

About the Author
Nina Bouraoui was born in Rennes, France, to an Algerian father and a French mother. Shortly thereafter, she moved with her family to Algiers, where she lived until the age of thirteen. Bouraoui received the literary prize Prix du Livre Inter in 1991 and the Prix Renaudot in 2005. Marjorie Attignol Salvodon is an assistant professor of French at Suffolk University. Jehanne-Marie Gavarini is an associate professor of art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and a visiting scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.

Reviews
"Bouraoui's quiet and inwardly focused coming-of-age novel delves deeply into intimate questions of self-definition-and ultimately the urge to become a writer."-Publishers Weekly
"Reminiscent of Marguerite Duras' The Lover, Bouraoui's phrasing and pace are bold and naive at the same time, much like a teenage girl. . . . Translators Marjorie Attignol Salvodon and Jehanne-Marie Gavarini have done a superb job of making Nina's voice ring authentically high and low, shrill and profound. A beautiful and moving book, Tomboy is entirely worthy of its comparison to Duras."-ForeWord
Praise for the original French Garcon manque: "Painful, enlightening, fascinating, impossible, yet very real. . . . It is these visceral feelings experienced by almost everyone of double nationality that Nina Bouraoui so masterfully expresses through her highly sensual and incantatory writing. In the beginning of a twenty-first-century world of demographic upheaval, exile, and thousands of children born of mixed race, many can relate to Bouraoui's struggles; thus the universal appeal of Garcon manque in spite of its French-Algerian context."-Melissa Marcus, World Literature Today
"Nina Bouraoui is by all accounts one of the most compelling of today's young French writers. The publication of her best-known work, Tomboy, is timely, as are its themes of French-Algerian biculturalism and trans-gender identity. Salvodon and Gavarini have rendered Bouraoui's intense, hypnotic and breathless style with admirable skill."-Isabelle de Courtivron, professor of French studies and director of the Center for Bilingual/Bicultural Studies at MIT
"Tomboy is a welcome first translation of Bouraoui's work. . . . The translators have made a fine novel fully accessible to readers of English."-Brian Thompson, Women in French Studies



Book Information
ISBN 9780803262591
Author Nina Bouraoui
Format Paperback
Page Count 129
Imprint Bison Books
Publisher University of Nebraska Press
Weight(grams) 159g