Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Seriously, don't bother. At the risk of sounding like a thirteen-year-old Selena fanatic, I direct you instead to Chris Perez's autobiography about his life with Selena. It is one thousand percent more believable than this supposed journalist's tale of intrigue and soap opera crap, which reads like it was written by a tabloid broadcaster. Rarely have I felt an author was simultaneously so self-satisfied and so horrifically duped, but this one appears to have been. She comes across as desperate to sound legit, not to mention important (if you count the number of times she compliments herself, I am positive they outnumber the times she compliments anyone else), but she is taken in by someone who clearly has Borderline Personality Disorder. She also comes across, at least to me, as desperate for dirt. She claims to have been merely 'following the story where it took her' and 'staying above the fray' and 'finding Saldivar innocent until proven guilty', but she continuously dives headfirst into the muck, and dismisses Abraham Quintinilla's heartfelt question, 'why must you all look for what isn't there' as unfair to her. I think it's incredibly fair, especially to her. I wish to hell I'd listened to all the reviews. Unfortunately, I mistook all of them being what some of them definitely are: complaints by people who think Selena is a saint, rather than a 23-year-old girl who was murdered by someone she'd been taken in by. Chris Perez put it best when he said that Abraham had once called him a cancer on the family; 'I turned out to be benign', but the real cancer wasn't detected until it was too late. (I'm paraphrasing, naturally.) Between all the garbage about lesbian dalliances (silly, because an obsessed fan can be obsessed without admitting to sexual feelings... perhaps they can be obsessed without having sexual feelings, I don't know), this author continually focuses on the close, personal relationship between Selena and Yolanda. Yes, we know, the entire family will be hating themselves forever for not seeing the danger in time. But that doesn't mean Yolanda Saldivar is anything other than an obsessed fan who lucked out and met her idol... and then, as fanatics do, took her life in what no sane and intelligent person thinks was an accident. People with BPD can fool many people. They can be charming. They can be loving family members and friends... to a point. Until you cross them, at which point you become their mortal enemy, as Selena became to Yolanda. While she was just beginning to mistrust her after months of being manipulated and lied to, Yolanda had already decided Selena was the enemy now. Based on the activities and encounters in the days beforehand, I think Yolanda considered killing her 'daughter' (another thing: Arraras lets her get away with the repulsive epithets; I don't think of myself as overly sentimental, and it made me feel sick to read the words of the killer) but was thwarted by Selena's husband's presence several times (you know, the one she was on the verge of divorcing). Oh, whatever. I'm wasting my time refuting a book that is thinner than one of its pages, which just aren't worth my energy. If this review does anything, I very much hope it convinces the next person not to buy this book. I sure wish I hadn't.