Stories redolent of innocent attachment tempered by obdurate experience—compassionate, tender and fresh.
Eight stories and a novella set in Panama introduce a dazzling new talent.
Henríquez’s voice is artfully simple and unembellished, soft yet quietly piercing. Her tales record realizations of separateness, moments of empowerment, acknowledgements of powerful family bonds. These emotional truths and insights are often experienced by young women, several with absent fathers. In “Ashes,” the endurance of a mother’s love is all that remains to Mireya, whose job has ended and whose boyfriend has deceived her. In “The Wide Pale Ocean,” Ysabel’s first taste of romance only reinforces her closeness to the mother who has brought her up alone, having gotten pregnant after a one-night stand. Many of the men here are unreliable, offering sex and the promise of caring, but then bringing disappointment, and sometimes worse. Yanina, in a story named after her, repeatedly asks Rene to marry her, but he can’t quite commit. “Beautiful” sees an errant father returning home, only to abuse his daughter Rosaria, who finds a way to expose his deeds and reclaim herself. Panama colors each story differently: in its dripping forests, tropical valleys, religious processions, teeming streets. Jobs come and go; electrical appliances are hard to sell; snow falls like a miracle. Two stories, “The Box House and the Snow” and “Chasing Birds,” are set outside urban terrain and lack of conviction. The title novella is the only piece with overt political references—to street violence, the American invasion and Noriega’s surrender—which are mirrored in the story of a family dispossessed of its home and that of a young boy who learns hard lessons of the heart.
Stories redolent of innocent attachment tempered by obdurate experience—compassionate, tender and fresh.Pub Date: April 6, 2006
ISBN: 1-59448-915-7
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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