What a novel! These 320 pages offer an epic
of Chicano family life in the US, specifically in San Diego, where the porous
border allows for crisscrossing and where the sprawling de la Cruz family lives
and loves, squabbles, gets in each other’s way, fights, and dies all, per the
back cover of the paperback edition, in “two bittersweet but riotous days.”
Memories of the characters reach back in time and in space into La Paz in Baja, California, where the patriarchal Big Angel’s father was a cop. His half-brother
Little Angel has assimilated to the extent of becoming an English prof.
The
family incorporates all shades and genders, and as one blurb among many in my
paperback edition declares, the novel is “cheerfully profane,” as one might
predict from the title of the first section, “Delirious Funerals.”
I loved the
novel’s fast pace and the sheer quirkiness of the numerous characters as well
as their range in sensitivity and insensitivity. This novel gave me the feel of
the Mexican American mélange, of what that world must be like, or at least
could be like.
"All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death."
In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader in a single weekend. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo,…
As the title might indicate, this darkly “true story” offers a radically different reading experience from Urrea’s novel.
This book is based on extensive research and interviews with principles involved
in a pathetically disastrous illegal border crossing that happened in May 2001.
Of the so-called “Wellton 26” who attempted to make their way through the
Sonoran Desert, fourteen died of heatstroke.
Urrea brings to life the migrants,
the coyotes, and the Border Patrol officers and somehow manages not to demonize
any of them, with the result that I was brought to some understanding of this
complex matter.
Urrea’s description of how one dies of dehydration strikes me as
“visceral.” The broad humor in his other fiction work is replaced here with darkness
and brutality. “In the desert, we are all illegal aliens,” Urrea writes, and I
believe he has the power to make us feel that way, to make us empathize to the
point of identifying with these desperate souls. It’s the very stuff of
tragedy.
This was a finalist for the Pulitzer in nonfiction, and my paperback came with a valuable reading guide that includes Urrea’s 2013 essay “Desolation Road,” a six-page conversation with him, and ten discussion questions—highly recommended.
A widely-praised piece of investigative reporting examining the journey of 26 men who in May 2001 attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of Southern Arizona through the region known as the Devil's Highway. So harsh and desolate that even the Border Patrol is afraid to travel through it, the Highway has claimed the lives of countless men and women - in May 2001 it claimed 14 more. History of high acclaim from the author of The Hummingbird's Daughter.
After more than 50 years as an English prof, I confess I remain leery of long novels and am inclined to explain my disinclination to embark on epic fiction by saying I’m a ponderously slow reader, which poky pace I blame on my love of poetry, which demands utmost concentration.
Accordingly, only four summers ago, after three false starts scattered over many years, did I at last conquer Brothers Karamazov, a boast-worthy achievement for me. Last year my major conquest—a vastly easier, pleasanter read than Dostoyevsky, was George Eliot’s deservedly famous Middlemarch, which ran to 600+ pages in my small-font version (50+ lines per page as opposed to the more common 35 or so).
What made this delightful novel especially gratifying to me was that I read its entirety to my wife, who also loved it.
It’s a great novel of character, or “characters.” It qualifies as social satire, the Horatian type that aims at human foibles and at issues of social class. The intrusive, sometimes moralizing narrator might bother some readers, but Eliot’s writing—her stylistic verve, panache — and the way she says what she has to say — won me over on every page.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'One of the few English novels written for grown-up people' Virginia Woolf
George Eliot's nuanced and moving novel is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes and human frailties in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his…
When
I agreed to write an entry on the prolific Chicano writer Gary Soto, I
had no idea he was that prolific. His New and Selected Poems had been a
finalist for the National Book Award two years before, and he was ten years
into his remarkable career as an author of books for young readers, from the picture
books in his Chato the Cat series to collections of stories and essays, novels,
and plays for readers of high school age.
I tackled all of Soto’s seventy titles in one way or another in this book
with increasing admiration for his achievements in all genres and for his
commitment to motivating young Chicanos to read and write.
