A gorgeously written collection of strong stories that blend Mexican and European folklore with the realities of...
A bilingual collection of fairy tale–inspired stories of life in a contemporary West Coast barrio.
In this debut story collection, García blends Mexican folklore and the tradition of the folk tales of the Brothers Grimm to present stories featuring Mexican, Chicano, and white characters in Santa Ana, California. In “The Carousel’s Lullaby,” the city’s 19th-century founder, Billy Spurgeon, reappears as a ghost, still fighting for white supremacy, while “Zoraida and Marisol” is a tribute to a murdered transgender woman. Witches make an appearance in “Just a House,” and in “Hector and Graciela,” the story of Hansel and Gretel is transformed into a tale of children left behind when immigration officials seize their parents; they escape from an ogrelike Minuteman through their own cunning. García draws on themes of gentrification, assimilation, and xenophobia while deftly capturing the day-to-day life of an ordinary community, and she infuses it all with a sense of magic. The writing is full of vivid imagery, local geography, and detail that evokes the place where the author wrote these stories as an artist-in-residence: “Bystanders watched the flapping flag at the top and twinkling lights underneath from afar, savoring their mangos with chile and limón in la plaza, occasionally pressing their lips to relieve the sting they craved.” The Spanish translation, which makes up the book’s second half, is also well-done; the only shortcoming is that the evocative moments of Spanglish and natural shifts between languages (“I know I’m just a vieja to most gente, but I believe in what I believe in, and not you or any of those city officials are gonna tell me otherwise”) are less evident in the Spanish versions. The stories are all satisfying narratives on their own, but they effectively combine to produce an intimate work that’s universal in its scope.
A gorgeously written collection of strong stories that blend Mexican and European folklore with the realities of contemporary America.Pub Date: March 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-86030-4
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Raspa Magazine
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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