Thoughtful and eye-opening, this is an admirable debut.
A nuanced look at the human cost of immigration policy.
It’s New York in the 1990s. Ana Falcón works as a seamstress. Her husband, Lucho, is driving a cab. Along with their two small children, the Falcóns are living with Lucho’s cousin’s family. The pressures—personal, financial—that Ana faces will be recognizable to most readers, but the fact that the Falcóns are undocumented immigrants adds a layer of complexity and peril to every choice they make. Ana and Lucho are limited in the kinds of jobs they can find and vulnerable to employers willing to hire workers illegally. Housing is hard to come by, and they know that their welcome with extended family is not indefinite. With no access to banks, they are forced to do business with loan sharks. Rivero offers a portrait of the immigrant experience that will undoubtedly ring true to many, but she also writes with great specificity. She offers insight into the economic and political instability that drove Ana and Lucho to leave Peru, and she depicts the ways in which class and race factor into the lives of the Falcóns. Ana’s background is rural and indigenous. Terrorists and soldiers were a threat to her and her mother. Lucho’s family is from Lima, and these differences color Ana’s relationship with Lucho’s cousin Valeria. Ana is a very well-crafted protagonist, sympathetic but not perfect. Her situation is circumscribed, but Rivero gives her considerable agency—including the freedom to make dubious choices. This is, obviously, a book that has a lot to say to our current moment, but it also has an emotional appeal that is timeless and universal.
Thoughtful and eye-opening, this is an admirable debut.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-287235-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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