Swarms of butterflies and hummingbirds, a jaguar on a leash, a hero who's writing himself into existence, beneficent ghosts of ancestors—all the trappings of post-Borges magic realism are gathered in this undeniably derivative and yet often quite funny, quirky meditation on Mexican-American relations, the politics of epidemics and the uses of history. To pack all that into a mere 200 pages, Morales foreshortens, stylizes, and truncates plots and characters, creating a series of rigid allegorical tableaux with the static vitality and crudeness of a barrio mural. In Book One, Dr. Gregorio Revueltas, a physician sent from Spain to Mexico in 1788 (significant date), seeks a cure for a plague ravaging the colony. Spanish oppression of the natives, the Inquisition's persecution of indigenous curanderos, exacerbate the suffering. Only after the outbreak of the French Revolution does the plague, wrought by microbes and compounded by human stupidity, subside. In Book Two, Chicano doctor Revueltas (ca. 1950-85) works in a southern California barrio clinic where violence, drugs, and AIDS are the names of the plague, again both viral and social in its origins. This chapter is the least satisfactory. AIDS is too close and too complex and Morales hasn't thought about it enough. His lack of grounding even in the medical facts undermines his fantasy. Book Three is set in the late 21st- century world of LAMEX, a rigidly stratified hi-tech society that includes both L.A. and Mexico City. The sci-fi social satire is full of vivid scenes and liberating inventions—every pharmacy, for instance, carries the cures for AIDS and cancer. The plague now is environmental. It comes from the sea, and when it strikes, whole cities perish overnight. Another Dr. Revueltas reads his ancestors' plague-year diaries and, fortified by his sense of the past, discovers not only a cure for this plague but a way to turn the social order upside down, putting the poorest Mexicans on top for a while. Morales (The Brick People, Death of an Anglo—both 1988) offers a novel that exhibits the very qualities it celebrates: energy, hopefulness, a reverence for roots.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55885-036-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
