Ordinary Girls is a first-person memoir about poor lives, wrong choices, and the culture of violence, drugs, and crime. Jaquira Diaz talks concerning their young family living in Puerto Rico and about their attempt to get to Miami Beach for a better world. Diaz portrays the difficulty of a hard life and what it takes to make it better with his history of a mentally disabled mother, sexual assault, depression, and finding her own sexuality.In Page #61 it says” The five of us were the kind of poor you could feel in your bones, in your teeth, in your stomach. Empty-refrigerator poor. Sleeping-on-the-floor-until-somebody-threw-out-a-sofa bed poor. Stirring-sugar-into-water-and-calling-it-lemonade poor. And then we’d take off again, like runaways. One apartment, and then another, and then another, never staying long enough to put up a picture, leaving while the place still smelled like the people who lived there before us.” They came from the struggle and Diaz and her family tried to get themselves out of it. Diaz took the wrong route in her life and she tries to overcome it.