THE RED CAMP
by Debra Diaz
A slender first novel that offers a pleasingly complex and vivid picture of life in ``El Campo Colorado,'' a workers' camp for (mostly Mexican) fruit-pickers in southern California. In alternating fragmentary narratives, the four Cruz sisters describe their hard lives and incomplete accommodation to American culture. They're acutely distinguished: ``bad girl'' Rita; ambitious Gloria, driven by her dreams of upward mobility and material success; dreamy Laura, who ``lives for TV'' (``Laura believes she is a member of the Partridge Family''); and—the story's principal narrator—dutiful Emily, who's persuaded to run for her junior high school's class presidency, and who understands better than any of them the injustice and animosity that make their father a belligerent drunk and their mother an embittered neurotic. The story is thin but expertly fashioned and filled with lovely, emotionally charged moments. An admirable debut performance.