OUR LADY OF THE ARTICHOKES

Offbeat immigrant stories centered around the Portuguese community in the San Francisco area.

This collection from Vaz (Fado & Other Stories, 1997, etc.) revolves largely around generational differences and cultural assimilation. In the title story, a financially strapped woman fabricates a story about seeing the Virgin Mary in her artichoke grove, much to the chagrin of her niece, who is struggling to fit in at her California school. The aunt is correct—people do flock to their house to see the spiritual miracle, but it doesn’t provide the windfall that she had hoped for. Meanwhile, in “All Riptides Roar with Sand from Opposing Shores,” a schoolgirl begins writing to a Portuguese religious icon seeking advice, and despite the fact that she never receives a response, improbably keeps up the correspondence for more than 40 years, chronicling her life in the United States. The heroine in “Taking a Stitch in a Dead Man’s Arm” distracts herself from her father’s grave illness by silently helping a star athlete finish his homework every day on the bus. In “The Mandarin Question,” a young woman confronts her issues with men after a very unusual childhood—she was raised by her aunt after her father shot her mother on the day she was born. And in “Lisbon Story,” a father dispatches his daughter to his hometown of Lisbon as he lies dying of cancer in America, ostensibly to quickly sell off a piece of property, but actually to distract her and keep her pulled into a world that once was his own.

Quirky plot points save this quiet collection from feeling clichéd, though it’s neither quite fantastical nor believable enough to fully satisfy.