A gorgeously written collection of strong stories that blend Mexican and European folklore with the realities of...
A bilingual collection of fairy tale–inspired stories of life in a contemporary West Coast barrio.
In this debut story collection, García blends Mexican folklore and the tradition of the folk tales of the Brothers Grimm to present stories featuring Mexican, Chicano, and white characters in Santa Ana, California. In “The Carousel’s Lullaby,” the city’s 19th-century founder, Billy Spurgeon, reappears as a ghost, still fighting for white supremacy, while “Zoraida and Marisol” is a tribute to a murdered transgender woman. Witches make an appearance in “Just a House,” and in “Hector and Graciela,” the story of Hansel and Gretel is transformed into a tale of children left behind when immigration officials seize their parents; they escape from an ogrelike Minuteman through their own cunning. García draws on themes of gentrification, assimilation, and xenophobia while deftly capturing the day-to-day life of an ordinary community, and she infuses it all with a sense of magic. The writing is full of vivid imagery, local geography, and detail that evokes the place where the author wrote these stories as an artist-in-residence: “Bystanders watched the flapping flag at the top and twinkling lights underneath from afar, savoring their mangos with chile and limón in la plaza, occasionally pressing their lips to relieve the sting they craved.” The Spanish translation, which makes up the book’s second half, is also well-done; the only shortcoming is that the evocative moments of Spanglish and natural shifts between languages (“I know I’m just a vieja to most gente, but I believe in what I believe in, and not you or any of those city officials are gonna tell me otherwise”) are less evident in the Spanish versions. The stories are all satisfying narratives on their own, but they effectively combine to produce an intimate work that’s universal in its scope.
A gorgeously written collection of strong stories that blend Mexican and European folklore with the realities of contemporary America.Pub Date: March 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-86030-4
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Raspa Magazine
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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