La Maravilla - Hardcover

Vea Jr, Alfredo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525935886 ISBN 13: 9780525935889

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1993

Synopsis

A nine-year-old half-Indian, half-Mexican boy struggles to find his place in the world in a novel set in the desert outside of Phoenix in 1958. A first novel. 12,000 first printing. National ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author:

Alfredo Vea was born in Arizona and worked as a migrant farm worker as a child and a young man. He served in Vietnam and after his discharge worked a series of jobs, ranging from truck driver to carnival mechanic, as he put himself through law school. Now a practicing criminal defense attorney, Vea is also the author of two previous novels, La Maravilla and The Silver Cloud Cafe. He lives in San Francisco, California.

From Kirkus Reviews:

From attorney and onetime migrant farmworker V‚a, a bewitching debut based on childhood memories of a squatters' settlement outside 1950's Phoenix. Most multicultural stories pale next to nine-year-old Beto's boyhood in the desert with his Spanish-born grandmother--who struggles to reconcile her curing powers with Catholicism--and his pagan Yaqui grandfather--who can leave his body and fly. Okies, Arkies, African-Americans, Indians who sing Irish railroad songs, transvestites, prostitutes, the Chinese grocer and cook regard each other with suspicious curiosity. Even the Fuller Brush man here is an outsider: a mutilated concentration-camp survivor. All fling about racial stereotypes but can never get away from shared food and music, mutual respect, love. (The Mighty Clouds of Joy Church allows even sinners to tap into its electrical service; the whole community is connected by extension cords.) People live in cardboard houses and junked cars, but much of the novel is very funny; and when people do suffer, it's not from their material poverty: White Vernetta became a prostitute out of sorrow following the lynching-murder of her black/Filipino boyfriend; jealousy leads to crimes of passion; people struggle with remorse for failings toward God and man. Meanwhile, V‚a's cross-cultural translations weave enchantment as Beto's grandparents initiate him into values meant to sustain him in materialistic, nontribal mainstream USA. V‚a's uneasy mix of magic realism, essay, tragedy, broad comedy, and didactic speech never quite blends, but each element- -like the different races thrown together in the desert--forms an integral part of this astonishing fictionalized tribute. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0525935886
• ISBN 13: 9780525935889
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320