“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Devil’s Highway Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction

Bibliography:

• In Search of Snow (1994)
• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction (2002)
• The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)
• Mr Mendoza’s Paintbrush (2009)
• Into the Beautiful North (2009)
• Queen of America (December 2011)

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

• Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993)
• By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996)
• Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998)

More Nonfiction:

• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004)

“The last time Ramiro Areyzaga was in Mexico was so long ago it was more like a fairy tale. . . A place of lush green shade, both a forest of trees and a jungle of huge waxy palm leaves, and a zocalo of marionettes and dancers, musicians and painters, with toys and balloons for the little ones and shawls for his grandparents. And of course the church, like none he’d ever seen, all the cool stone space, and God – which he never got over, so much so it stayed inside him, quietly, the rest of his life, like it was the word Mexico itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (NOV 9, 2011)

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest book, Before the End, After the Beginning, although a slight collection, is loaded with insight and humor. It’s a book about identity, about the tension between limiting factors outside our control– our race, our class, our gender – and our complexity as individuals.

The collection opens with a disorienting story, “please, thank you,” about a Mexican-American man struggling to regain control of his body after a stroke. Uncomfortably dependent on the hospital staff, forced to face his physical vulnerabilities with tasks as mundane as taking a shower or balancing a checkbook, his psychological vulnerabilities also come to the fore. All he sees around him are minorities persecuted by a white majority trying to keep them down. Everyone from his adult children to the hospital staff shake their head, bemused by his racial conspiracy theories, but as his body heals, so do the lifelong wounds of prejudice, at least enough that he can advise Erlinda, a Mexican janitor, to rise above the ignorance around her so that the wounds she endures on account of her race won’t fester and leave deep and putrid scars.

While sometimes, an illness forces us to recede into ourselves, often times, it’s through our relationship with others that we struggle with undesirable aspects of our identity. “The Last Time I saw Junior,” a hot-headed Mexican must face his former self when an old buddy comes around and manipulates him (once again) into helping him. In “Cheap,” a Mexican musician is forced to face both his fiscal and emotional frugality when the pursuit of an unfairly low bid by a local contractor causes him to face the exploitation of other Mexicans, who he tries to help.

“Willows Village,” explores the other side of help – dependency. When Guillermo moves from El Paso to Santa Ana in search of a job that will support his young family, he has little choice but to stay with his aunt, his mother’s sister, Maggy, who, according to his mother, was “an all-spoiled this and did-all-bad-that” who got away with murder on account of her looks. Maggy lives in a tract housing development, called Willows Village, with a kitchen “loaded up like a mall gourmet store” and a bedroom as “beautiful as any hotel.”  Her husband is gone for weeks at a time on business and so Maggy manages her loneliness by keeping an unfortunate friend, Lorena. In exchange for room and board, Lorena does the errands Maggy doesn’t want to do and accepts Maggy’s capricious generosity with a smile and appropriate gratitude. While Guillermo pounds the pavement in search of a job, his dependency on Maggy and his mother, on Gabe, the man who employs him for a time, frustrates him, and with the wine always flowing at the house, it’s inevitable that tensions and resentments will come to a head, exposing the line between need and reliance.

Gilb explores the fraught dynamics of attractive women financially dependent on men through the eyes of the males who actually love them. In “Blessing,” a young man sets out to visit his high-school sweetheart, now married to a much-older man. Sexually unsatisfied, she visits him during the night, which prompts him to flee her house in the morning, putting him in the wrong place at the wrong time. In “Uncle Rock,” a young boy deals with having a mother who is beautiful enough to attract restaurant owners and engineers, but not white enough to be marriageable. With a precocious understanding of the sexual marketplace, he deflects a professional baseball player’s advances in favor of a man with modest means who worships the ground his mother walks on.

Perhaps our most poignant search for identity is in the face of death. In “Hacia Teotitlan,” a dying man journeys home to a Mexico that he remembers as a fairy tale with glorious churches. He rents a room that is too small for his body, and vows to discontinue his medication, resigning himself to dying with the same resignation of a stray dog. While he may not have found what he was looking for, he walks away with new ways of expressing his innermost desire – to be well.

Each of these stories is a wonderful meditation on identity and the pain we endure in the struggle to create ourselves. In 2009, Dagoberto Gilb suffered a stroke; these stories are the product of his recovery. Although judging from the simple power of this book, I’d say it definitely marks a return to form.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dagoberto Gilb
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our short  review of: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña And if you like this one, try: The Madonna’s of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse

Bibliography:

• Winners on the Pass Line (1985)
• The Magic of Blood (1993) 
• The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1995)
• Woodcuts of Women: Stories (2001)
• The Flowers (2008)
• Before the End, After the Beginning (November 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Gritos: Essays (2003)

Other:

• Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature (2006)

“There were too many people here now, a crush of bodies on the sidewalks and too many cars on the highways, people crowded into houses and apartment buildings in Santa Ana, in Anaheim, cities that used to be good places to live. The landmarks of Scott’s youth, the burger stands and the diners, were now covered with the grimy stains of time and something else, an alien presence.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (OCT 17, 2011)

From the looks of it you could never tell that the beautiful Torres-Thompson home in fancy Laguna Rancho Estates, is on the cusp of unraveling. But look closely and you can see the edges of the tropical garden coming undone, the lawn not done just right; and these are merely the symptoms of greater troubles. For the couple Scott Torres and Maureen Thompson the country’s financial crisis has come knocking, even in their ritzy Los Angeles neighborhood.

Scott Torres once spearheaded a booming software company that went broke in the software bust. As the book opens, he is reduced to doing mundane work for a new software firm. The family is beset with enough financial insecurities that Scott and Maureen let go of two staff members in their hired help team—the gardener, Pepe, and the babysitter, Lupe. 

The one maid left standing, Araceli Ramirez, once only held cooking and cleaning responsibilities but now finds herself, much to her annoyance, occasionally watching the boys, Brandon and Keenan and the baby, Samantha.

As Araceli cleans and cooks, she silently watches the dynamics of the family unfold. One day, Maureen, tired of cutting corners from the lavish lifestyle she once knew, decides she will splurge on a new desert garden—one that will replace the decaying tropical one that gardener Pepe once so lovingly tended. The astronomical sum she spends on the landscaping is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Scott and Maureen have a heated altercation, witnessed by Araceli. The next morning, Araceli wakes up to find both her jefe and jefa (there’s a little Spanish left untranslated in the book, some of which can’t be made out just by context) gone with the baby. The boys are home alone with her. As it happens, Maureen and Scott leave independently each one assuming, through a set of coincidences, that the other spouse will be around to take care of the boys. Neither is; the boys are left completely alone for three whole days.

At the end of the third day, at her wit’s end, Araceli decides she will bring the boys to Los Angeles where she is sure their Mexican grandfather (Scott’s Dad) lives. The three set off on an adventure to find grandpa. Predictably they never do.

In the meantime, Maureen and Scott have returned home only to find the boys and the housekeeper missing. They immediately jump to the conclusion that the boys have been kidnapped. The police are called in and all hell breaks loose.

The fact that Araceli is an illegal immigrant complicates the situation tenfold and soon the case makes national headlines. After a series of adventures, the boys are reunited with their parents. But the case has by now developed a life of its own. Scott and Maureen for their part become the stand-in for rich, privileged folks who get constantly shown up as the poster children for bad parenting.

Then there’s Araceli. On the one hand she is worshipped by fellow Mexicans as the exploited, underprivileged Mexicana—someone who represents all the collective immigrant angst in the United States. On the other hand, there’s the flag-waving crowd—members of whom insist that Araceli needs to be deported if not permanently jailed for her crimes. As the book makes its way through to the end, Araceli decides to take some of these matters in her own hands.

The Barbarian Nurseries starts out with a good premise but at every stage it moves so predictably that one can see the ending coming way before it actually arrives. The author, Hector Tobar, won a Pulitzer as part of a team at L.A. times covering the L.A. riots. Unfortunately his journalistic brio doesn’t translate well to fiction. The Barbarian Nurseries has one coincidence too many woven into the story until it totally strains credulity. For example, when Maureen leaves home with Samantha and goes to a spa, the delays that hold her there for three whole days are really difficult to swallow.

Tobar does have keen insight into the various segments of the California narrative—the ultra-rich millionaires, the hired help, the immigrant psyche—but he falls short of weaving these narratives into a compelling story. One would have loved to learn more about Araceli’s past in Mexico, or even about Maureen’s Midwestern roots for example. But too often Araceli and her owners fall into clichéd stereotypes, for what people like them should say and do. Even the media circus that attends the “kidnapping” case drags on way too long.

To his credit, Tobar successfully raises some essential questions: about the act of parenting in these intensely wired times and about the place of immigrants in our larger social fabric.

The Barbarian Nurseries has been billed as the great contemporary California novel and it certainly has all the elements for one. Unfortunately its somewhat predictable story has the book degenerating into precisely the thing it derides the most — a sound bite.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Héctor Tobar
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: My Hollywood by Mona Simpson

Bibliography:

• The Tattooed Soldier (2000)
• The Barbarian Nurseries (September 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (2006)

“Samuel knew that he was living through dangerous times – this was not the moment to simply sniffle and weep. He had left Hamburg just in the knick of time – Kristallnacht had happened just nine months earlier – the “party” in Europe […] had already begun. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederick Knabe  (SEP 29, 2011)

Samuel Berkow, at thirty-eight, stands at the crossroads: In 1938, life in Germany is fast becoming dangerous for Jews. At the urging of his concerned uncle, he agrees to leave Hamburg and emigrate to Guatemala, where his cousin is expected to help him settle. In The Price of Escape, David Unger explores his hero’s self-conscious and stumbling efforts to put his German existence out of his mind as he prepares for a new one that carries promise but is also full of uncertainty.

The narrative quickly moves on to Samuel’s travel on the ship en route to the port town of Puerto Barrios and then focuses on his first three days on land. Guatemalan-American Unger, recognized as one of Guatemala’s prominent writers today, convincingly portrays his hero’s sense of utter confusion and helplessness as he enters, totally unprepared, a foreign world that bears no resemblance to his own. He contrasts Samuel’s former lifestyle, his self-confidence, based mostly on physical appearance and family wealth, with the poverty-ridden, appalling and at times dangerous conditions in Puerto Barrios. Thus, Unger not only builds an affecting portrait of one refugee’s complete dislocation in an unfamiliar environment and his awareness that he must cope somehow, he paints at the same time a colourful, vivid picture of a community in decline, abandoned by a corrupt political system that allows private company interests to control people’s lives and basis for existence.

As the novel unfolds, Samuel encounters a wide range of odd characters, starting with American Alfred Lewis, the dubious captain of the “tramp steamer” that brings Samuel into port. He turns out to be one of the manipulating representatives of the sinister United Fruit Company, the big corporation that has made of Puerto Barrios a “company town” but recently downgraded it to a mere reloading point for banana shipments. While Lewis warns Samuel not to linger in town and to get on the train to Guatemala City as soon as possible, he does everything to add to Samuel’s bewilderment and delay. Every time Samuel is set to make a move to leave, something or somebody interferes: the dwarf, Mr. Price, who offers himself as a guide to the one and only “International Hotel,” his bare room there, or George, the hotel clerk/manager who appears to be one of the more helpful people. Others are added to the colourful mix: a defrocked priest, the station master, an old prostitute, or various odd assemblies of people in the streets or cafes/bars… None of these may in fact behave in any way threatening, however, in his mind, Samuel cannot extricate himself from their influence so that he can get to the train station in time.

Unger creates an atmosphere of suspicion, of hidden and open threats that intermingle in Samuel’s mind with images from his past life, thereby escalating not only his uneasiness but also resulting in his own increasingly strange behaviour towards the people he meets. Personal memories from his past life, especially his short-lived disastrous marriage, still haunt him, more so than any of the recent dangerous political changes in Germany. People come at him with either sugary, even creepy, friendliness or with sarcastic comments and aggressive, even violent, behaviour, one can turn into the other without warning. Samuel appears to be caught in a vicious circle. With only basic Spanish, his communication is fraught with misunderstandings. Who is there to talk to openly and, above all, whose advice can he trust?

Unger illustrates Samuel’s increasing disorientation with scenarios and encounters that recall in some ways Kafkaesque hopeless labyrinthine struggles. Yet, here, the protagonist is responsible for much of the precarious situations he finds himself in: His fashion-conscious clothing make him a laughing stock among the locals; his inability to extricate himself safely and in time from several brewing conflicts puts him into physical danger. His reluctance to eat the local food and even drink the water results in stages of temporary mental confusion, even delirium, that make him act totally irrationally. Afterwards, he has no memory of what he said or did or why, for example, he ends up in the muddy water near the harbour, totally wet and soiled, crawling on all fours, searching for his passport…

Will Samuel manage to escape or will he be completely taken over by the locality? What is “the price” of escape – both from Germany and from Puerto Barrios? The novel’s conclusion answers these questions aptly, coincidences not withstanding. Over the course of the three-day story, Unger creates a continuous narrative tension that keeps us as readers engaged. We never quite know, what accident or confrontation awaits the protagonist next. Despite his sympathetic and expansive characterization of Samuel Berkow, I found him less than a likeable protagonist, at times arbitrarily overdrawn and his behaviour somewhat exaggerated. Readers who anticipate – given various publicity materials – that considerable attention in the novel is given to the historical situation in Germany in the nineteen thirties, will be disappointed. Unger’s primary concern is Guatemala.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Akashic Books; 1 edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Unger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fame: A Novel In Nine Episodes by Daniel Kehlmann Banana by Daniel Koppel

Bibliography (English only):

• Life in the Damn Tropics (2004)
• The Price of Escape (April 2011)

“We’re never gonna escape this,” Paps said. “Never.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 22, 2011)

We The Animals in this wonderful debut novel refers to three brothers, close in age, growing up in upstate New York. They are the Three Musketeers bound strongly together not just because of geographical isolation but because of cultural separateness too. The brothers are born to a white mother and a Puerto Rican father—they are half-breeds confused about their identity and constrained by desperate and mind-numbing poverty.

This wild and ferocious debut is narrated by the youngest of the three, now grown, looking back on his childhood. It’s a coming-of-age story told in lyrical sentences that are exquisitely crafted. And while there are many moments of beauty in here, there are also ones of searing violence.

The boys can do nothing but stand back and watch as the intensely abusive relationship between the parents plays out everyday and it’s almost worse because the evidence creeps up after the fact. One day, Mom’s eyes are swollen shut and cheeks turned purple “He told us the dentist had been punching on her after she went under; he said that’s how they loosen up the teeth before they rip them out,” the narrator, barely aged seven, recalls. The severe abuse is compounded and made even more heartbreaking by the boys’ innocence and gullibility—they buy this lie and many others, whole.

The daily struggle for survival is heart wrenching yet without melodrama. “We stayed at the table for another forty-five minutes, running our fingers around our empty bowls, pressing our thumb tips into the cracker plate and licking the crumbs off,” Torres writes about one of the many evenings when one can of soup and a few crackers would have to make do for all of them. The boys don’t quite understand why their parents are seemingly happy one moment and why their mother slips into deep bouts of depression the next.

One of the many beautiful chapters in the book is one called “Night Watch” (each short chapter in this slim volume has a name). In it, the boys accompany Dad to work when he finds work at a night job. They have to sleep on the floor in sleeping bags in front of the vending machines, out of plain sight. They are here (and not home) because Mom is at her job working the night shift at a local brewery. The next morning, when a white man comes to relieve Dad of his duties, he spots the three musketeers and can guess at the situation. From the argument that follows, the boys already know that Dad has probably lost this job too. The family’s otherness, especially as perceived by the boys, is just beautifully rendered here.

As the boys enter adolescence, the narrator immediately knows he is separate and apart from his brothers. “They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent,” Torres writes. It wouldn’t be a reveal to say that the difference lies in the narrator’s sexuality, which can be glimpsed early on, if one pays close attention.

In a recent interview, the author Justin Torres has said: “I think that everybody struggles with family in some way and I hope that they can come away realizing that you can go back to those experiences and find something beautiful in everything and that you can make art out of your experiences.” With We The Animals, Torres has crafted just that—a beautiful and memorable work of art. This slender novel packs a powerful punch.

Justin Torres proves you don’t have to pen a giant volume to write precociously about huge themes such as family, race, adolescence and sexuality. Of course Torres writes so beautifully that you almost wish that he did.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 49 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	An interview with Justin Torres
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Bibliography:

• We the Animals (August 2011)

“It’s hard to catch a lizard with your bare hands.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 23, 2011)

Burmese politics, including their political prison system, is harrowing and vicious. Not a lot has changed in the past fifty years or so, other than changing the name to Myanmar. Until very recently, they were under military rule and they are still one of the least developed nations in the world. Karen Connelly has not only written a striking and engaging tour de force about this area, but she has brought a country’s atrocities into focus that needs attention badly, and help from developed nations. However, she hasn’t forgotten the novelist’s rule of thumb to entertain. It doesn’t read like a diatribe or soapbox, it reads like an exquisite, dramatic story of friendship, endurance, compassion, love, and faith in the human condition.

Teza is a young man of (approximately) thirty who is revered by freedom fighters in Burma (Myanmar) for his political songs that expose the corrupt government, and give hope and spiritual fuel to the people. He is in solitary confinement in his seventh year of a twenty-year sentence for this “crime.” The conditions in this prison are something beyond harsh and cruel–absolutely appalling, savage–with lice, scurvy, rickets, bed bugs, and other illnesses invading the prison population. Also, the jailers frequently abuse the prisoners physically.

Teza has become adept at his Buddhist meditation practices and has a strange but beautiful relationship with the lizards, spiders, and ants that share his cell. The most desired item for prisoners, besides food–as he is practically starved by the warden and guards–is pen and paper. If caught with it, it adds another several years to your sentence. Teza is therefore in isolation with nothing but the creatures, a dirty mat, stinking water, inedible food, and his mind. He lives by the power of his heart and mind. Teza knows how to be free in this cage, and his subtle power over the jailers, a different kind of power, is fascinating to comprehend.

Little Brother is a twelve-year-old orphan whose father worked for the prison until he died. This young boy, who doesn’t read or write, knows nothing outside the prison, and has no desire to leave. He is afraid of the outside world. He spends his days running errands for the guards or helping the top-tier prisoners–the ones with lots of pull and power–get extras of food. He is beloved by the few that have half a heart, but generally treated as sewerage by those in power.

The story moves in graceful, gradual, lyrical strokes, bringing the world of the inmates and the jailers to a taut climax. The building relationship between Teza and Little Brother is the most weighty of all. It works brick by brick, like the building of a cell, layer upon layer, surging into an intense, suspenseful, atypical thriller. There are hints of Papillon,(although that story was non-fiction), but this is not a jailbreak thriller. But, like Papillon, it has much to do with the life inside the mind, and the cultivation of formidable inner strength, and the bonds between people who are seemingly so vastly different, and yet connected.

If you only read a handful of books this year, do read this one. Besides its presence as a quietly exciting, non-formulaic suspense thriller, it will invite and heighten interest in this culture and this country. You will thoroughly inhabit these characters and story, page by page; the quintessence of fine literature is actualized in the characters of Teza and Little Brother. Finally, this an unforgettable story that lives in, breaks, and mends the human heart.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (April 8, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Karen Connelly
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin

Bibliography:

• The Lizard Cage (2007) 

Nonfiction:

• Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journa (1994)
• The Dream of a Thousand Lives: A Sojourn in Thailand (2001)
• Grace and Poison (2001)
• Burmese Love Song: A Memoir (May 2010)

“Sometimes, as I remember, my voice is that of the ten-year-old boy I was then; sometimes the voice of the seventy-year-old man I am yet to be; sometimes it is my voice, at the age I am now… or the age I think I am. Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JUL 11, 2011)

He calls himself “Harry” now, after his new hero, the famous escape artist, Harry Houdini, hoping that one day he, too, will be a successful escape artist. Discovering a book about Houdini, hidden in the room that will now serve as his bedroom, the ten-year-old boy finds a new source of inspiration. Only the day before, and without warning, his family had to leave their comfortable house in Buenos Aires with nothing but the bare essentials. An abandoned country house has to serve as their temporary shelter. Harry already misses school, his friends and his board game Risk. With his routines disrupted, his sense of dislocation is further heightened when papá tells him and his little brother that they all have to take on new names and forget their former ones: it is too dangerous. Set in 1976, against the backdrop of what has become known as Argentina’s “Dirty War,” that left thousands of people as desaparecidos – disappeared without a trace -, Marcelo Figueras takes us on a moving and intricate journey, through hope, devotion and betrayal, through human frailty and strength, through loss and perseverance.

By concentrating on the life of one family, in hiding and on the run, Figueras opens a narrow, intimate window into this traumatic reality. Young Harry, the primary voice in the novel, while trying to cope with the day-to-day challenges the family faces, is also living in a colourfully imagined world full of heroes and battles, and preparing for his own, Houdini-like, “escapes” from the dangers he senses around him. His depiction of his surroundings, descriptions of his encounters with the toads in the pool… are lively and endearing. These and others feel immediate and richly drawn; the voice of the child is totally convincing as it fluctuates between innocently funny to wisely inquisitive.

The novel opens with a decisive moment in time, before it rolls back to the beginning, prior to the events unfolding that led up to this point: Harry and his grandpa say goodbye to his beloved parents: “The last thing papá said to me, the last word from his lips, was ‘Kamchatka.’” Harry will never forget his father’s last word. In his mind, it is like a code word between father and son, a promise, a sign of eventual victory. Kamchatka, for him is a safe place, from where a temporary retreat changes into fighting back, moving forward to winning. Kamchatka is one of the “remotest territories waiting to be conquered” on the Risk board, the game he loves to play with his papá. He is a curious child, fascinated not only by Superman and famous battles and their historical heroes. His interests in the ancient philosophers, in biology, astronomy, and geography are just as strong. For as long as he can remember, he knows, for example, that the board game Kamchatka resembles – in its remoteness and its physical profile – the actual one in the north eastern tip of what was then the Soviet Union: “a frozen peninsula, which is also the most active volcanic region on Earth. A horizon ringed by towering inaccessible peaks shrouded in sulphurous vapors.” In his imagination the fictional and the real Kamchatka merge into one, a safe and beautiful place where he will travel to when the time comes…

The adult Harry is a constant companion voice to that of the ten-year-old, recalling vivid memories, filling in what his younger self didn’t know or couldn’t conceive and trying to make some sort sense of his life by reflecting on the games played by memory and time. “Time is weird,” he muses. ” That much is obvious. Sometimes I think everything happens at once, which is anything but obvious and even weirder.” Between the two voices the novel contains much more than the story of a young boy who desperately tries to maintain his playful childhood, his study, and his new-found friendship with the mysterious Lucas, while at the same time hoping to support his parents by “playing his role” in the family. He observes, more than he understands, and yet senses why the “uncles” have disappeared one after the other, why his adored and adoring mamá does no longer behave like the “rock” of the family, why the psychological stresses show on his parents’ faces. With great apprehension he watches them in their constant challenge to demonstrate the emotional strength needed to keep the family together as long as possible and to provide for Harry and his young brother the sense of safety and normalcy in a dangerous period of history. Yet, he does not dare to ask…

Beyond the child’s story, Kamchatka is also the adult’s multifaceted meditation on history, on learning about life and the universe, on time and memory. Figueras, in fact, structures his novel along the lines of school periods: Biology, Geography, Astronomy, Language and History.  In each section, young Harry learns at a child’s level and through observations and practical experiences what the older Harry then places into the respective context. The two voices are so intricately intertwined that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which voice is speaking to the reader and affording young Harry maturity he cannot have had. As Harry later describes himself: “Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other.” For me, some of these “scientific excursions,” while interesting and valuable in their own right, can take the reader too far away from the essence of the story. They tend to turn, at times, the political and personal story more into a subtext than may be warranted given the overall direction of the narrative.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat; (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederikie Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Marcelo Figueras
EXTRAS:	Publisher page
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Bibliography (translated only):

• Kamchatka (2003; September 2010 in US)

“Cleaning other people’s houses—their cherished possessions in both good and bad taste, the chipped dishes they eat off of, the ratty sofas they make love on, the unlevel, puckering floors they shed curly hairs on—is the most intimate relationship you can have with them. Yet every boss I’ve worked for wants that relationship to be unobtrusive to the point of being invisible. I have done my best to live my life in between those two places, intimacy and invisibility. Over the years I’ve absolved the remains of a thousand indiscretions without judgment, and have learned not to ask questions. Men staying over, friends moving in, children moving out; none of this is my concern. If my job is done right, what you find when you get home is a comforting antiseptic, fresh Band-Aid smell, spotless floors, and no evidence another human being, a cleaning lady, was ever there. ”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose (JUN 23, 2011)

The silent, overlooked residents of Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood play the starring role in author Brando Skyhorse’s debut, The Madonnas of Echo Park. The novel, really more of a collection of short stories, each narrated by a different character, presents to the reader different facets of both the Mexican and Mexican-American experience in multicultural Los Angeles. Skyhorse, winner of the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award for this novel, was born and raised in Echo Park. An Author’s Note sets the story (it should be noted, though, that the author calls it a fictionalized account). The sixth-grade Skyhorse, unaware of his Mexican heritage—he’d been told he was American Indian—inadvertently insulted a classmate, a girl named Aurora Esperanza. This novel, then, is his apology to her, his attempt to share with the public the world of Echo Park.

“Bienvenidos,” narrated by Aurora’s father Hector, starts the novel in a highly readable, compelling fashion. Hector, while born in Mexico, has been living in the U.S. his entire life and has no memory of Mexico. Without citizenship or papers, however, work options are limited, and when the restaurant he worked at for eighteen years closes, day labor is all he can find. While on a job, Hector witnesses a crime and faces a moral dilemma: help justice be served by reporting the crime, which will require him to reveal his own illegal immigrant status, or remain silent and thus avoid deportation. The conflict is sharp, affecting, and, like so many of the stories, packs an emotional punch.

One of Skyhorse’s greatest skills, besides writing stellar prose, is the ability to write convincingly from the perspective of a wide variety of characters. Ex-convicts, gang members, estranged mothers, rebellious, hopeful teens all ring true. In “Los Feliz,” we are in the head of Felicia, Hector’s ex-wife, who cleans houses while struggling to raise a teen daughter and assimilate into the wealthier culture that provides her income. Felicia shares her story without a trace of self-pity, while observing the clear dichotomy between her world and that of her clients.

“In Los Feliz, I needed to be invisible and inaudible. Mrs. Calhoun and I managed to communicate without ever saying a word to each other’s face. The massive double front doors made a loud, drawbridge sound when I unlocked them, letting her know I’d arrived. I’d shout “Good morning” in English until Mrs. Calhoun responded with an echoed “Good morning,” often from one of the bathrooms. That was my sign to start at the opposite side of the house. When I finished a room, Mrs. Calhoun stepped inside and read a magazine until I finished the next room. Like the arms on a clock, we moved together through six bathrooms, five bedrooms, the split kitchen, two “recreation” rooms (a name that confused me; I didn’t have a room to create things in, let alone “re”-create them), and a living room as big as Aurora’s school cafeteria. We could spend the day inches apart and never see each other.”

Skyhorse does not vilify the wealthy in any way, and the conflict remains clear, blameless, in the subtle tension behind Felicia’s interactions, or lack thereof, with her client. Less convincing, however, is the friendship that blossoms between Felicia and Mrs. Calhoun after a year of strained formality. Mrs. Calhoun suffers from an emotional malaise that never quite gets pinned down. Depression? Ennui? Fear of being left alone? Agoraphobia? Marital strife? As a reader closer to Mrs. Calhoun’s description than Felicia’s, I found it annoyingly murky. For all the marvelous work Skyhorse has done in bringing the Mexican-American characters and their friends to life, this segment of the population, the wealthy white woman, struck me as a shallow, half-finished depiction. Which, given the story’s intent, still manages to be appropriate. Felicia’s English is self-admittedly poor, so it would be difficult to imagine her fully understanding what made Mrs. Calhoun tick. A special friendship? Harder to buy.

Petty gripes aside, this is a very important chapter and story, as the reader learns the full backstory of who the “Madonnas” of Echo Park were. Felicia and her daughter Aurora were among a group of mothers and daughters who liked to dress up like the singer Madonna and dance to her music in the street. Tragically, at one such event, the group gets caught in gang crossfire, in which a three-year-old girl is killed. This pivotal scene has long term repercussions and is the link that ties together so many of the novel’s stories, in startling and sad ways.

One of the most outstanding stories in the collection is “Rules of the Road.” Bus driver Efren Mendoza has been marvelously rendered, so achingly real and human, I feel like I know the man, and I respect him, even as I don’t wholly like him. Having left home at fourteen in order to evade membership in the gang both his brother and father belong to, he has fought to earn a respectable place in society, even at the risk of becoming hardened, unsympathetic.

“My salary of $21.27 an hour relies on my punctuality (I carry a back-up watch; you are penalized if you are one minute late for your shift). It’s a fair wage, one we had to go on several strikes—five during my time—to protect. Those socialist Che-worshiping Reconquistadoras complained these strikes hurt poor Mexican workers who cannot afford a car the most. You’re a Mexican, they say, trying to bond with me by speaking Spanish. How can you turn against your own kind? they say. But they aren’t my kind. They’re not Americans. They’re illegals, and the benefits to law-abiding Americans like me outweigh whatever inconveniences these people face breaking our laws.”

When things go wrong on one of Efren’s shifts, the reader feels it all: the shock, the frustration that this is not how things in his world are supposed to go, his moral and professional dilemma, the troubling but very real conclusion. Great stuff. I will never forget this story.

The Madonnas of Echo Park is a vivid, intricately woven story of eight disparate voices that come together to portray a once-invisible neighborhood steeped in cultural identity, violence, incidental beauty, now caught in the grips of change brought by time and gentrification. Spanning thirty years and stories from three generations, filled with emotional heft and bittersweet truths, along with a dollop of magical realism, Skyhorse’s debut serves up satisfying fare indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Free Press (February 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Brando Skyhorse
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Previous Pen/Hemingway winners: A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living by Michael Dahlie Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Graceland by Chris Abani

Bibliography:

• The Madonnas of Echo Park (February 2010)

“So, without precise coordinates, deprived of places and dates, I began to exist. The imprecision extended to my name; and to keep from boring the reader again with the narrative cliché of identity problems, the facile what’s-in-a-name, I’ll simply say that I was baptized — yes, with a splash of holy water and everything: my mother might be a convinced iconoclast, but she didn’t want her only son ending up in limbo on her account — as José Beckman, son of the crazy Gringo who killed himself out of homesickness before the arrival of his descendant.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 18, 2011)

When Joseph Conrad was working on Nostromo in the early 1900s, and setting it in the fictional Latin American country of Costaguana, he found that his first-hand knowledge of the region, based on a couple of brief shore visits a quarter-century earlier, was insufficient. He therefore consulted friends who had spent greater time in northern South America and constructed a setting that is entirely believable, not only in its composite geography but also in its way of life and political turmoil. Now Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez imagines that Conrad might have had one further contact, José Altamirano, born in Colombia but recently arrived in London as an exile from Panama, following the province’s secession from Colombia in the revolution of 1903. Writing now in 1924, the year of Conrad’s death, Altamirano believes that the novelist has stolen his life story and that of his country to make a fiction of his own, utterly obliterating him in the process.

Altamirano writes in a voice that is immediately attractive. Witty, knowing, speaking directly to his readers, and making hay with narrative and historical conventions, he is an engaging travel companion and tour guide to the past century of Colombian history. Kudos to the translator Anne McLean for maintaining especially the humor of this voice, as when General Rafael Uribe Uribe dies “with an ax embedded in his skull and the weight of several civil wars on his shoulders,” or a group of envious conspirators break in on Simón Bolívar in bed with his mistress, “determined that this coitus shall be interruptus.” Altamirano’s story begins with the birth of his father in 1820, a Renaissance man who is simultaneously a lawyer, a doctor, and a writer, until exiled from the capital as a liberal and unbeliever. José himself is born in 1855, and remains in ignorance of his father until his late teens, when he goes off to Panama — at this time still a Colombian province — to find him. Coincidentally, a young seaman named Józef Konrad Korzeniowski makes his one visit to Panama at about the same time, gun-running with a French ship. The two do not meet.

It is probably going to be difficult for a foreign reader to keep up with the changing political situation in Colombia itself, but it would be worth Googling the history of Panama, especially the difficult building of the railway across the isthmus, the failed French plan to cut a sea-level canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the horrendous loss of life to yellow fever and loss of capital to fraudulent speculation, and the American involvement in securing a sovereign zone in a newly-independent country where the canal would ultimately be built. All these form the background to Altamirano’s personal story, which has more than its share of danger, love, and loss. Vásquez loses none of his narrative virtuosity, but halfway through his book begins to pall, partly because the mixture of personal and political no longer seems to gel, and partly because he also begins to tell the parallel story of Conrad in Europe and Africa. Though interesting enough in itself, the parallels seem forced and both stories get diluted. For that matter, the similarities between Altamirano’s story and Nostromo are not really that close at all, and good though Vásquez’ sense of place may be, Conrad’s is even better. The moral climax of the book depends entirely upon which side one backs in the Panamanian revolution, and while Altamirano clearly feels deeply, it is difficult for a Gringo to have any horse in that race at all, making it hard to sympathize with the author’s crippling guilt.

So other than an entertaining and swashbuckling yarn, what is the novel about? Any light it casts on Conrad and his Nostromo is relatively trivial; this does not even have the relevance that, say, Jean Rhys’ HIgh Wind in Jamaica has to Jane Eyre. But in a less specific sense, it is a fascinating exploration of history and fiction. When Altamirano complains to Conrad “It’s not the story of my country,” the novelist replies: “Of course not. It’s the story of MY country. It’s the story of Costaguana.” Fact has become fiction. But the whole book is about the reshaping of fact. As each regime takes over from the other, it’s justifies its aims in the reframing of history and the writing of bad but patriotic poetry. The senior Altamirano practices a form of “refractive journalism” in Panama, bending the truth, and is paid by the Canal Company to write copy that will keep investors coming up with the money. His son uses every narrative trick at his disposal to present or conceal facts as he sees fit. And even the author plays the game by including among his solemn list of works cited an entirely fictitious history written by a fictitious character invented by Conrad for his Nostromo!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (June 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Guardian article on Juan Gabriel Vásquez
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia page on Nostromo
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Bibliography:

• Los Amantes de Todos Los Santos (2001)
• The Informers (2004)
• The Secret History of Costaguana (2007; June 2011)

“Yes of course it was interesting to take part in the ritual, that was what we had come here to do. It was slightly terrifying the first time, all of the screaming and the smoke; in that way it was a little like your experience coming up the river at night, except that you are all very close together in one giant, enclosed hut. Seeing God was worthwhile, of course. I doubt that anything in our Western tradition would have shown Him to me so personally.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 07, 2011)

What an apt title! Patchett at her best is a magician of wonder, and this is indeed among her best.  I count her Bel Canto as one of the best books I have ever read. I have read each of her others looking for the same quality, finding it to a large extent in The Magician’s Assistant, but being quite disappointed with her rather prosaic Run, which preceded this one. I found myself reading State of Wonder slowly and more slowly, allowing myself to sink into her depth of character, enjoying the deliberate pace of her revelation, reluctant to start another chapter until I had digested the one just finished. The urge to spin out a book for as long as possible is rare for me — but I remember it well from reading Bel Canto, a pivotal experience which reawakened a love of fiction that has never let up.

The book begins as a sort of Heart of Darkness. Marina Singh, 42 years of age, a physician turned pharmacologist, agrees to go to the Amazon rain forest where her employers, a big Minnesota pharmaceutical company, are developing a promising new fertility drug. The researcher in charge of the study, seventy-something Dr. Annick Swenson, has cut off most communication, refusing all electronic contact, refusing even to reveal the location of her camp, relying only on the occasional letter to get carried down by boat to Manaus. The aerogramme that arrives as the book opens reports the sad news that Marina’s lab-mate Anders Eckman, who had been sent down some months before to investigate, has died of fever. Marina flies to Brazil to complete Anders’ report and find out the details of his death. What makes her quest doubly alarming is that the intimidating Dr. Swenson had been Marina’s supervisor years before at Johns Hopkins, when she had made a crucial mistake in the operating room that caused her to abandon the practice of medicine and turn to research, a trauma that lingers with her still.

But if you think you know where Patchett is heading you would be wrong. She has a way of setting up a situation that you view with dread, only to shift it, open it, work her peculiar alchemy on it. The first hint of this is in a performance at the Manaus opera house, a La Scala in the midst of the jungle; appropriately, the opera is Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, whose hero journeys into Hades to bring back life. Manaus already seems like an anteroom to Hell, a tawdry viewing-platform for tourists, and Patchett does not belittle the many dangers waiting in the Amazon jungle along its smaller tributaries. But she responds to its wonder also, starting with the night sky: “Beyond the spectrum of darkness she saw the bright stars scattered across the table of the night sky and felt as if she had never seen such things as stars before. [...] She saw the textbook of the constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink.” Having visited the Amazon myself, I found it uncanny how well Patchett could capture such near-mystical experiences as well as the mundane ones, the total isolation of the living forest only miles from the tourist traffic and T-shirts.

Yet this is no mere travel book. Marina Singh’s real exploration is her discovery of other people and of herself. Annick Swenson turns out to be a far more complex character than the forbidding paragon she thought she knew. Her immediate colleagues and the tribe they are studying form a fascinating interconnected society; both the ethnology and the medical research are pretty convincing, at least to a layman. There turn out to be reasons for Dr. Swenson’s secrecy, and moral issues that play an increasing part. Marina will find her endurance, skills, loyalties, and even her love tested. As in all her best books, Patchett gradually creates a special space, a kind of sacred enclave within the bounds of realism. Seen with a skeptical eye, some of what happens as the novel nears its climax may seem implausible, though it is certainly exciting. But Patchett banishes skepticism, a magician-monarch ruling over a land of wonder. What she enshrines there is deeply, movingly human.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 973 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ann Patchett
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Cellophane by Marie Arana Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett

Bibliography:

• The Patron Saint of Liars (1992)
• Taft (1994)
• The Magician’s Assistant (1997)
• Bel Canto (2001)
• Run (2007)
• State of Wonder (2011)

Nonfiction:

• Truth and Beauty (2004)
• What Now? (2008)
• This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (November 2013)