Perfect for girls growing out of YA titles, and adults will also savor this lovely coming-of-age tale for its elegant...
The young narrator and her native Puerto Rico go through major transitions, in this reflective second novel by Cofer (The Line of the Sun, 1989; stories: The Year of Our Revolution, 1998, etc.).
The rules are very clear in the 1950s, Consuelo shows us as she describes a neighborhood transvestite who is good enough to come to the back door and do her mother’s nails, but “in public we were to pretend we didn’t know him.” He’s a fulano (outsider), and though our narrator is expected to live up to her name and be a consolation to her parents, quietly rebellious Consuelo fears her feelings might also place her outside the strict local order. Her father, maintenance engineer at a San Juan hotel, worships everything American and modern; her mother clings to island traditions. Her younger sister Mili (short for Milagros, “miracle”) is cheerful and light where Consuelo is serious and dark, but Mili’s increasing strangeness is only one of the developments bringing new tensions to the family. “My cousins and I were speaking a language that separated our world from that of our parents,” Consuelo writes, “a slang peppered with terms like ‘rock-and-roll’ that had no direct equivalent in our native tongue.” When Consuelo sleeps with a boy who tells all his friends, she doesn’t die of shame but finds the strength to reject his judgment: “I was not like my mother who had to get the permission of all her relatives and ancestors before making any decisions about her life.” She’s guided by her cousin Patricio, who finds freedom in New York, and by Lucila, a fellow student from the slums who is everything the gente decente in Consuelo’s family scorn. Cofer’s luminous prose anatomizes both the constriction nature of traditional Puerto Rican life and its beauty. We understand Consuelo’s abiding love for her homeland as well as her need to get away.
Perfect for girls growing out of YA titles, and adults will also savor this lovely coming-of-age tale for its elegant language and nuanced but definite judgments about manners and morals.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-20509-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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