FRONTERA STREET

A strongly detailed if sometimes overwrought first novel about an Anglo woman who crosses boundaries—physical, emotional, cultural—when she moves in with a Mexican family.

Though the storyline depends far too much on coincidence and ghostly interventions, the Guatemalan-born Barrientos (now a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer) renders the life in a small west Texas bordertown very well indeed. Dee, who was raised in the affluent Anglo suburb of Westside, is 28 when her husband dies suddenly from an aneurysm. She returns home, where her widowed mother, wanting to travel, gives Dee her house and leaves. Lonely and depressed, Dee finds work in the barrio in a fabric store. Coworker Alma resents her because she’s a gringa—and that, for Alma, means trouble: In Mexico, Alma had been seduced by a gringo, Paul Walker, who abandoned her after she bore their daughter Socorro. The later story of how Dee moves into Alma’s house on Frontera Street and not only finds a family but changes Alma’s life as well is narrated by the two women and the now-15-year-old Socorro. When Dee, pregnant, collapses at work, a reluctant Alma takes her home, and Dee is soon reveling in the warmth of the barrio. She tries to help out as much as she can, but she doesn’t tell Alma that she’s from Westside, which will make for complications: Alma, who once worked there, was accused of stealing by a Westside matron. Alma also worries that ballet dancer Socorro, on scholarship at the Arts High School there, is being drawn into that alien world, and now Socorro wants to meet her father. Meanwhile, Dee must contend with crises—the surprise appearance of Socorro’s father at her coming-out ball, confessions about her own Westside upbringing—that strain the friendship almost to the breaking point.

More a vivid portrait of a culture and a place than a gripping narrative.