Fajardo-Anstine takes aim at our country's social injustices and ills without succumbing to pessimism. The result is a...
Eleven achingly realistic stories set in Denver and southern Colorado bear witness to the lives of Latina women of Indigenous descent trying to survive generations of poverty, racism, addiction, and violence.
"Ever feel like the land is swallowing you whole, Sierra?" the narrator's mother, Josie, asks her in "Sugar Babies," the first story of Fajardo-Anstine's debut collection. "That all this beauty is wrapped around you so tight it's like being in a rattlesnake's mouth?" Here, it's becoming a mother at 16 that threatens to swallow Josie, prompting her to abandon 10-year-old Sierra. In "Sabrina & Corina," which follows two cousins, women's lack of opportunities and their dependence on men undo Sabrina, a blue-eyed, dark-haired beauty. While Corina, the plainer of the two, goes to beauty school, Sabrina spirals into substance abuse and sleeps around. She's murdered at the story's start, and Corina has the horrible task of going to the mortuary to do her cousin's makeup, literally covering up the violence she suffered. In "Julian Plaza," gaping holes in our social safety net ensnare the characters. When Nayeli gets breast cancer, her family has no good choices: Her husband's health insurance won't cover effective treatments, and he can't care for her for fear of being canned. Fajardo-Anstine writes with a keen understanding of the power of love even when it's shot through with imperfections. Nayeli's young daughters try to carry their mother home from the neighbor's where she has been sent to die. And Sierra from the title story still fantasizes about her mother returning at some point, "joyously waving to me, her last stop."
Fajardo-Anstine takes aim at our country's social injustices and ills without succumbing to pessimism. The result is a nearly perfect collection of stories that is emotionally wrenching but never without glimmers of resistance and hope.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-51129-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Sixteen stories in three groups (War, Armistice, Peace) but united by a common gift: the author's fine-tuned ability to craft astute observations of human nature. In his foreword to this second collection, Flynn (The Last Klick, not reviewed, etc.) says he hopes the reader will find ``the spirit of God in every story,'' but it seems more the spirit of man that colors the best of the pieces here, with their themes of the Vietnam War, Christianity, and the sometimes unclear distinctions between good and evil. Most manage to stay free of stereotype and clichÇ. In ``Land of the Free,'' a black father and his adolescent daughter remain dignified as they stand up to ignorance in a backwoods Texas town. The Hemingwayesque ``A Boy and His Dog''a young Marine in Vietnam loses confidence in his trained dog when the animal fails to detect a mine and allows another Marine to dieis a clear twist on the traditional version of man and man's best friend. ``At Play in the Sewers of the Lord'' is also a spin on the familiar: An inheritance, a sewage plant, becomes not a boon but an albatross. And ``Games Children Play,'' though it wraps up too neatly, highlights the complex relationship between children who think they need to parent an elderly mother and the still keen, resentful mother herself. The author's chief weakness is a liking for the obvious: ``Reluctant Truth'' is saved, barely, by its quirky grandfather, but the title story makes too overt an analogy between hyenas and men, while ``X-mas,'' about a modern-day birth of the baby Jesus, suffers from a lack of subtlety that's fortunately the exception more than the rule throughout. In most of the stories here, though, Flynn portrays quiet dignity, humanity, and a wisdom that comes from experience.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-87565-144-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
``I coulda married Joe Morgan, who owns three Tastee Freezes,'' a wife tells her husband—not unkindly—in Hoffman's third collection (after By Land, By Sea, 1988). It's just this sort of low ambition that runs like a fault line through these competent but commonplace stories. ``Home'' is the mid-South, by turns genteel, grotesque and seedy. Hoffman's range is broad, but the track is well worn: Feisty widows drink ``tonic'' and bemoan their faded beauty; horses are noble and bird dogs soft of mouth; great-great-grandaddy was a Confederate colonel and a US senator. At their best, these stories relate with great tenderness the small kindnesses people share: Celeste, the black maid in ``Coals,'' antagonizes but ultimately comforts her grieving white employer; the retired and embittered preacher in ``Sweet Armageddon'' prays for doomsday but is solicitous toward his wife, regretful of the poverty to which his principled stubbornness has reduced them. At their worst, the pre-fab familiarity of character and situation dulls the intended effect. ``Abide With Me,'' meant to be a raucous tall tale about a man who sees God and raises a statue in tribute, degenerates instead into a catalogue of tired bumpkin caricatures and cute southern colloquialisms. Like the anglophile fox hunter in ``Points,'' for whom the chase is ``choosing to reach back into the best epochs the centuries had to offer, as well as a statement of where one stood in respect to a world becoming increasingly common, disordered, and hateful,'' many of these characters—aging, fighting irrelevance, confronted with evidence of their own deterioration as well as that of society—seek refuge from the inhospitable present in the past. In the best southern literary tradition, they are more often haunted than comforted by their heritage. Well-crafted, but oh so familiar.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8071-1835-4
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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