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While in the Marine Corps, Lisa served in Parris Island, South Carolina; Twentynine Palms, California; and Okinawa, Japan. After college, she backpacked solo around Europe trying to figure out her place in the world. Coming across good luck in Paris, she lived and worked in an international youth hostel and then as an au pair in a tiny studio in the heart of Montmartre.
Lisa returned to the States and tried many jobs while she began writing about her experiences in the Marines and her travels. She now lives in the Boston area with her husband and two children.
Reviewed by Alice DiNizo for Readers' Favorite
Lisa Minassian, daughter of an Armenian immigrant father whose family survived genocide and an English mother whose family withstood the bombing of London in World War II, deliberates and then decides to join the Marines at age nineteen. She has partied until she dropped with her friends and has changed colleges, and then her college majors, with great frequency. Lisa wants to see the world and have adventures other than drunken brawls. Becoming a Marine is her answer...and it's a good answer.
Author Lisa Cordeiro has written a first-rate, well-edited autobiography. She intersperses her recounting of boot camp training on Parris Island with italicized letters from her family and friends back home. This is a great literary technique, and the reader will be absorbed as Lisa survives thirteen weeks of training by tough, no nonsense drill instructors. The author writes of thinking about how her grandparents survived the horrors of genocide and war, and acknowledges therefore she will have the gumption to survive basic training. She learns the history of the Marine Corps, how to administer first aid, use an M-16, endure "humps" and obstacle courses, and finds out how to kill the enemy by any means possible.
Cordeiro has written a book that many different types of people will enjoy reading. It is a woman's coming-of-age story told extraordinarily well. There is humor in its pages as she tells of learning to work together with the other recruits. There is also great wisdom in these pages as the author honestly tells the reader of her decisions as a young person entering adulthood.
