Multilayered, empathetic, and touching account of a workingman’s life.
In Enrado’s debut novel, a retired Filipino farmworker looks back on his long and costly struggle for civil rights.
As the story begins, Fausto Empleo is the last remaining Filipino elder in his retirement village for farmworkers. A visit from his estranged cousin prompts Fausto to review his life. Born in 1912, he came to the United States in 1929, following his older cousins, all bent on pursuing some version of the American dream. Ready for hard work, Fausto was unprepared for the racism he encountered: being called “brown monkey,” signs that read “Positively no Filipinos allowed,” etc. With his cousins, Fausto followed the harvest up and down California to cut, pick, and process crops. The labor was hard, wages low, conditions primitive. Eventually, the expatriates helped build a Filipino community in central California, starting families and buying property. In 1965, wanting a better life for his children to come, Fausto joined the Delano grape strike, but the strike’s hardships cost him his house, car, and, worst of all, his beloved and pregnant wife, Marina, who returned in disappointment to the Philippines, leaving Fausto feeling empty. At the end of his life, Fausto learns some answers to long-held questions and gains a measure of peace. Enrado’s characterization is beautifully observed; she conveys the tactile, sensory quality of farmwork, the way a much-used tool fits a man’s hand, and how dirt seeps in to every wrinkle of clothes and body. Fausto’s culture, friendships, and inner life see rich expression. For a novel dealing with social justice issues, it can be difficult to avoid the soapbox, but Enrado is nuanced. She notes, for example, that before the war, the land Fausto’s enterprising cousin Macario buys “belonged to a Japanese farmer, who’d been relocated to an internment camp”—proof that one minority’s opportunity can come at the expense of another. The novel’s tone of reconciliation is well-earned: as Fausto says, “nothing worth fighting for is easy.”
Multilayered, empathetic, and touching account of a workingman’s life.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Eastwind Books of Berkeley
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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