Find Snake Hips: Belly Dancing And How I Found True Love Articulated By Anne Thomas Soffee Offered In Volume

by her boyfriend and facing, Soffee decides to take up belly dancing to get in touch with her Lebanese roots.
Her adventures are touching and funny,
What did I from this book Younger and thinner are not necessarily better, Isn't it worth picking up just for that This book was slow and uninteresting, I suppose she felt her boring life had been interesting enough to someoneto write this drivel but it was a long story about her loneliness and desperation.
It doesn't talk about actual belly dancing much at all, I have been belly dancing for a little while, and I really enjoyed her description of the dance classes, the costumes probably the funnest parts and the teachers.
This is probably therd orth book about dance that I've read where the main female tries to find true hetero love by dancing.
Women would do well to examine thedemographics of dance classes before choosing this approach, Anne Thomas Soffee is a damn fine writer, Being married to someone studying bellydance AKA Danse Orientale it seemed like reading this was written in the rules IN INK for me.
After about the first page, it was clear this would be no chore at all, Soffee is an engaging, entertaining writer, and she spins a tale of how bellydancing kept her mind occupied after moving back home to Virginia following a heartbreaking dumping from her then boyfriend, and helped not only rebuild her selfconfidence, but also explore her own halfLebanese roots.
Consequently addded to my "To Read" list for this year is her other book, Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City, about her experiences as a rock journalist in LA's music scene during thes.
Both books are by the Chicago Press, Belly dancing is fun, great workout and makes you feel very sexy, This book made me feel the opposite, This was a definitely fun and light read, I'm going by memory now as I've since swapped the book with another reader, I enjoyed her behindthescenes look into the bellydance world, but I remember wishing more tribal bellydance was shown that's what I danced.
Anyway, Soffee's funny if not a little too selfconscious but, since the Snake Hips's a definite lightread, her selfconsciousness isn't so bad.
After being dumped by her longtime tattoo artist boyfriend, Anne finds a flier for belly dancing classes and tries it as a way to get over her ex and reconnect with her Lebanese roots.
She throws herself full force into this specialized type of dancing and the unusual community that surrounds it.
A great sneak peek into the world of belly dancing,

Kelly M. H. Bought this from the author at the first James River Writer's Festival way back in, I enjoyed it a lot the author has a wonderful voice and a very wry, humorous outlook on life to which I can relate.
It didn't hurt that.of the book is set in Richmond VA, where I live,

There was a lot about belly dancing, as you can gather from the title, and perhaps a bit more about the author's failed love life than I wanted to know about, but overall, I enjoyed the book immensely.
My only complaint, and it's a small one, is that she spends so much time bemoaning the relationships that didn't work and going into great detail about them from start to finish that when she finally found Mr.
Right, I felt his story was brushed over and rushed, I wanted more details about

him, but I can understand why, if she was still in a relationship with him when the book went to print, she wouldn't necessarily want to divulge too much.


Still, very enjoyable, I look forward to reading another book by the author soon, i would give this bookif i could, it changed my life, mostly in ways i never thought existed, Interesting book. It was much more about belly dancing than the true love, I liked the interspersed stories about disastrous datinggood comedy, The belly dancing part was empowering! The true love shouldn't have been billed on the front cover because I didn't think that was really what it was about.
Redemption through female camaraderie, finding one's ethnic roots and hip shaking, Soffee presents herself as a bit lost, very likable and earnest, always striving to be a better dancer, a better friend and a better LebaneseAmerican Princess.
She recovers from a disastrous relationship with a tattoo artist tattoo artists, she claims, tend to have barely legal girlfriendsnot sure what the age of consent is in North Carolina by throwing herself into belly dancing and finding some real friendships and a few rivalries along the way.
What starts out as a potentially wellwritten easy read turns into a slightly tedious example of why everyone's life is not actually memoir interesting.
. . This hilariously uplifting memoir follows an Arab American womans merry life as she shimmies her way from getting dumped by her tattooartist boyfriend to coming to grips with being single, ample, and.
Feeling lost and heartbroken, Anne Thomas Soffee moves back home to Richmond, Virginia, Against the wishes of her extended family and friends, she enrolls in a belly dancing class hoping to heal her heart and reconnect with her Lebanese roots.
Her life is never the same after she discovers the riotous world of American belly dancing, a warm and welcoming subculture where younger and thinner are not necessarily better.
Wildly funny adventures ensue as a newly confident Soffee embarks on romantic adventures with a domineering sheik and a beautiful Lebanese boynextdoor.
Among the zils finger cymbals and thrills of attending classes and performing in moose lodges and county fairs, Soffee is surprised to find happiness and true love along the way.
This replaces.
This is a good light read, with plenty of humor in it, which is exactly what I was looking for at this point in my life.
When you're eight months pregnant, those gut wrenching/deep social commentaries are just too much for your hormones to handle.


The premise of the book is based on Soffee's real life, but I'm not sure exactly how closely it follows it.
The title explains it all: she dates a few guys, finally finds the right guy, and learns to bellydance during the whole process.
Unless you're somewhat familiar with the American bellydancing world, you probably won't be too interested in that part of the book.
But since I've been bellydancing aboutyears, I found myself nodding and understanding several situations she talked about, and knowing the names of some dancers she mentioned.


That said, if you're really looking forward to the bellydancing aspect of the book, you might be let down, because it's not the central focus by far.


Nothing makes you appreciate your family and upbringing more than reading about someone else's.
No matter how many times she calls it a "suburb", the author describes her hometown as a seriously creepy ghetto.


For the intermittent belly dancer, this book is a lot of fun, chock full of words that you'll feel all elite for knowing.
It's a novelized account of how the author picked herself up from bad relationships and drug addictions and cleaned up her life, finding a new happiness and selfsufficiency in raks orientale and her local belly dance community.


Not sophisticated nor entirely consistent, Snake Hips doesn't have to be, Readers comfort themselves with the joy of dancing, just like the author does, And that is the mark of effective writing,

Note: This is the only book I've read for me in weeks.
Everything else has been manuscripts and review requests, Now I'm inspired to read something else purely fun, I wanted so badly to like this book! It especially sucks not to like a memoir, because it feels like you're saying you don't like the very real person whose story is told within its pages, but the fact is certain people's stories will resonate with you and others just won't.
I've done bellydance in the past, and the idea of a woman using dance to get through difficult times with a lot of humor was right up my alley.
And there were a couple of parts that genuinely made me laugh,

About/of the way through I realized I was just waiting for the book to be over with and I was liking the author's behavior less and less.
I found her fixation on landing a man because she had some kind of crazy Princess Jasmine fantasy extremely offputting.
It completely squashed all other aspects of her character for me, I wasn't expecting it to be that kind of "finding Mr, Right" book the description made it sound like she finds her Mr, Right because of her bellydancing, not because she's obsessed with marrying Prince Ali, That's how she puts it, It just wasn't what I thought it was going to be, I'm going to keep this review short because I read this one for a book club and I want to save most of my thoughts for the discussion.


That said, I didn't really love this book, and that makes me sad because there aren't a lot of books for or about belly dancers.


The author writes with something of a humorous, selfdepreciating tone, but unfortunately she depreciates almost everyone around here, too.
Family, boyfriends, fellow dancers, patrons, . . In what seems like an attempt to make the book wacky, she focuses on peoples' flaws and oddities.
Unfortunately, this also means she focuses a lot on the flaws and oddities of her own dance community, too.


Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that the belly dance world is all sunshine and roses, but I think you should limit how much dirty laundry you air when you write a book that will be read by the general public and your fellow dancers.
I wish she had focused a little more on the benefits she got out of the dance, and her relationship with the dancers she did like, rather than focusing on some of the more negative aspects of being an amateur dancer in a toosmall community.


I can't say that I'd really recommend this book, although I'm sure my fellow belly dancers will keep reading it in our quest to read everything we can find about the dance.
I found this book largely disappointing, I was curious to read it because it's about belly dancing and I'm a belly dancer.
Belly dancing is not often depicted in literature,

This book fell flat for me, Some aspects of belly dance culture were well depicted, but the book desperately needed an editor.


And what really bugged me was the author's representation of Arab men, She's half Lebanese and decides she wants to date an Arabic man, power to you. But it seemed to me like she was fetishizing them and really treating Arabic men as stereotypes.
I found her representation of middle eastern culture to be very "othering" and I was really bothered by this book.
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