What Night Brings (Working Classics) - Softcover

Trujillo, Carla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880684942 ISBN 13: 9781880684948

Publisher: Curbstone Books, 2003

Synopsis

What Night Brings focuses on a Chicano working-class family living in California during the 1960s. Marci—smart, feisty and funny—tells the story with the wisdom of someone twice her age as she determines to defy her family and God in order to find her identity, sexuality and freedom.

About this title

About the Author

Carla Trujillo is a Mexican American fiction writer, editor and administrator at the University of California, Berkeley. She has lectured on Ethnic Studies, both at U.C. Berkeley and also Mills College in Oakland, California. She has also taught courses in Women's Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the former Director of the Graduate Diversity Program at U.C. Berkeley. She is the author of two novels, What Night Brings and Faith and Fat Chances. She is also the editor of an anthology, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, and a critical study, Living Chicana Theory. She lives in the Bay Area. 

Reviews

This first novel by a Chicana writer who has been active as a lesbian anthologist and editor is a pleasant surprise: a lively, picaresque tale, told in the world-weary but ever-hopeful voice of 12-year-old Marci Cruz. Marci's father, Eddie, is a drinker and womanizer who often takes his belt or his fists to Marci and her sister, Corin, but whose wife, the besotted Delia, seems oblivious of his faults. Much of the tale embraces the ingenious ways in which Marci and Corin try to outwit him, or least make their mother see him for the passive-aggressive monster he is; perhaps the most delightful of these is the long saga of their attempt to photograph him, with a cheap box camera lent by a sympathetic uncle, in incriminating situations with his girlfriend. Through all this, Marci is also becoming increasingly aware that she is romantically drawn to other girls and wishes she could become a boy so as to express such feelings appropriately. The lesbian undercurrents are subtle and touching, by no means doctrinaire, and the book, which offers some hope for the girls after a climactic confrontation with Eddie, conveys admiration for their vast resilience in the face of adversity.
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*Starred Review* At one point in this compelling first novel, set in 1960s northern California, 11-year-old Marci says to her uncle, "Secrets, everyone has them, even me." First-person-narrator Marci, with her unconventional way of looking at life and uncensored mouth, is a funny, very savvy guide to her family's hidden shames. She has her own secrets (she loves girls, not boys, and she wants her father to go away--forever) and knows many of her family's--her father's infidelity, her uncle's homosexuality, her cousin Danny's drug addiction. This complex melange drives the story and lends urgency to the plot. But it is the indomitable Marci, the burr beneath her parents' skin and the author of her own salvation, who is the center of this book. What Night Brings is a robust addition to the growing body of Latino and Latina writing. Reminiscent of Anaya's coming-of-age novel, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), and Hart's memoir, Barefoot Heart (1999), it most strongly brings to mind Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls (1993) in its frank portrayal of physical violence, the rawness and obscenity of the Spanish dialogue, and the awareness of Marci's budding lesbianism. Trujillo is definitely a writer to watch. Ellen Loughran
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Edition details

• Publisher: Curbstone Books
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1880684942
• ISBN 13: 9781880684948
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 242