A nuanced, vibrant look at the American experience through Mexican-American eyes.
Pride and tragedy unfold in this tale of Mexican Americans navigating the artificial border that splits their ancestral homeland.
In the latest from Castillo (Watercolor Women, Opaque Men, 2005, etc.), a handful of Mexican Americans in a small town outside El Paso, Texas, tell of their search to find Rafa, an illegal immigrant who constantly returns to Mexico, despite the dangers he faces at each crossing. Regina, Rafa's sister, has U.S. residency and a stable job as a teacher's aide, thanks to her unconsummated marriage to a Vietnam conscript who never made it back. Gabo, Rafa's 15-year-old son who lives with Regina, writes letters to the saint Padre Pió about the pain of losing his mother, murdered during a border crossing; his fears for his father; and the challenges of daily life shoulder-to-shoulder with gang members and police. American-born Miguel Betancourt, a teacher in Regina's school, is politically astute and passionate about the injustices his people have endured for centuries. Together with Abuelo Milton (Miguel's blind but still dapper grandfather), Miguel, Regina and Gabo face down the “coyotes” who prey on border crossers and who may know of Rafa's whereabouts. Regina, a down-to-earth, hardworking woman in her 50s who struggles to come to grips with her past, is elevated to an object of adoration by these three men—Gabo appreciates her selflessness, Abuelo Milton her beauty and Miguel the fact that she is one of those women “who not only look good but probably rustles steer in their spare time.” When tragedy strikes, Regina proves that her heart is big enough to be worthy of their love. Castillo personalizes her characters by allowing them to speak in their own voice, from the heart, and the frequent sprinkling of Spanish words throughout the text underscores the cultural divide between Mexican and Anglo culture.
A nuanced, vibrant look at the American experience through Mexican-American eyes.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6500-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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