My thirteen-year-old is privately distraught over a possible apocalypse next year. At his age, I was terrified of the impending rapture that my zealot relatives had convinced me would happen before I graduated high school. I will be forty next month, and fortunately I no longer live in fear of end-time scenarios. But to be honest, I’m dreading the election year, because no matter what a person’s political leanings are, there are the others out there who we get sucked into believing it’s fair game to speak badly about in order to bolster our own beliefs and WIN.
The entire political process makes my gut ache.
Illegal immigration is one such topic we’ll be hearing a lot about in the coming months, so I’ve decided to immerse myself in a story about “Amexicans” (the original working title) from the perspective of someone not running for political office.
The Madonnas of Echo Park is a literary novel by Brando Skyhorse. A Pen Hemingway winner, this book also includes a reading group guide; a plus for Book End Babe chapters. (Publication date June 2010.)
We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours.
With these words, spoken by an illegal Mexican day laborer, The Madonnas of Echo Park takes us into the unseen world of Los Angeles, following the men and women who cook the meals, clean the homes, and struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream.
When a dozen or so girls and mothers gather on an Echo Park street corner to act out a scene from a Madonna music video, they find themselves caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. In the aftermath, Aurora Esperanza grows distant from her mother, Felicia, who as a housekeeper in the Hollywood Hills establishes a unique relationship with a detached housewife.
The Esperanzas’ shifting lives connect with those of various members of their neighborhood. A day laborer trolls the streets for work with men half his age and witnesses a murder that pits his morality against his illegal status; a religious hypocrite gets her comeuppance when she meets the Virgin Mary at a bus stop on Sunset Boulevard; a typical bus route turns violent when cultures and egos collide in the night, with devastating results; and Aurora goes on a journey through her gentrified childhood neighborhood in a quest to discover her own history and her place in the land that all Mexican Americans dream of, “the land that belongs to us again.”
Like the Academy Award–winning film Crash, The Madonnas of Echo Park follows the intersections of its characters and cultures in Los Angeles. In the footsteps of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie, Brando Skyhorse in his debut novel gives voice to one neighborhood in Los Angeles with an astonishing— and unforgettable—lyrical power.
Lilith Saintcrow is one of my favorite authors. I knew of her from her Dante Valentine series, but was late to the game due to being seriously behind on my TBR, so I never opened the door to that world. When Night Shift (Jill Kismet series, Book #1) debuted, I thumbed through the blue and white paperback about a nightside Hunter and was hooked before purchase with the anonymous quote that set the tone for the series, “The most terrible thing to face is one’s own soul.”
THE ORCHARD is the story of a street-smart city girl who must adapt to a new life on an apple farm after she falls in love with Adrian Curtis, the golden boy of a prominent local family whose lives and orchards seem to be cursed. Married after only three months, young Theresa finds life with Adrian on the farm far more difficult and dangerous than she expected. Rejected by her husband’s family as an outsider, she slowly learns for herself about the isolated world of farming, pesticides, environmental destruction, and death, even as she falls more deeply in love with her husband, a man she at first hardly knew and the land that has been in his family for generations. She becomes a reluctant player in their attempt to keep the codling moth from destroying the orchard, but she and Adrian eventually come to know that their efforts will not only fail but will ultimately take an irreparable toll.
By blood, by word, by magic…
I have three weeks and two days before my children are back in school and my husband will be traveling abroad for business until then, so, of course, I’m in perilously late spring cleaning mode. Items that no longer belong or deserve space in our home are finding their way to a cardboard box that will be stored for a future yard sale or a trip to Goodwill.