A politically well-timed tale of the journey to El Norte.
An affecting debut on Mexican poverty, illegal immigration and cosmic injustice.
Split between the narratives of a ten-year-old girl and a woman in her 30s, the novel illustrates the travails of immigration—the often hard fate of those left behind, the danger of crossing the United States border and the splintered sense of home experienced by those who have made it to El Otro Lado, the other side. The cycle of tragedy for young Juana begins with a flood: Unable to keep the water out of their cardboard shack, Lupe goes for help, instructing daughter Juana to stay on the table with baby Anita. When Lupe and her husband Miguel return, they find Juana asleep and Anita dead underwater. To pay for the cost of their baby’s burial, Miguel decides to go North for work before the interest on the loan triples the original debt. Weeks pass and Lupe sinks into despair they haven’t heard from Miguel, and the town assumes that he’s abandoned her, an all-too-common occurrence. Worse yet, their creditor Don Elias is demanding payment from Lupe, and gives her two options—she becomes his whore, or he has her jailed. Juana stands by helplessly, praying to the Virgin to bring her father back, watching her mother give birth to a baby boy that Don Elias kidnaps, selling quesadillas at the train station to feed the now raving Lupe. Poor Juana’s story gets much worse before it gets better. Adelina’s tale is equally bleak. Living in Los Angeles and working as a social worker at a woman’s shelter, she is searching for the father she hasn’t seen in years. Her singular purpose has kept her away from life and love until she finds a coyote who recognizes the description she gives of her father, a man who died crossing the border. Now with her father’s ashes, she is going to bring him home to Mexico. By the (not-so-surprising) end, Juana and Adelina achieve the kind of hard-won justice that occurs only in fiction.
A politically well-timed tale of the journey to El Norte.Pub Date: June 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6957-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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