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.
"Carla Trujillo's What Night Brings puts one more wonderful Latina novelist on the must-read list right up there beside Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez and Cristina Garcia. This moving story, told in the completely convincing voice of its young protagonist, explores living with domestic abuse and longing for the maternal protection that always fails to materialize. We touch the mysteries of religion in a child's life, and are completely captivated by a young girl's budding lesbian identity. Character and situation building are exemplary, yet we are hit hard when the book takes its final turn. What Night Brings is a page-turner that lingers long after the last page has been turned."-Margaret Randall
"A story that is at once heartbreaking and hilarious, beautifully told by a wise and wise-cracking young girl."-Sandra Cisneros

About this title

About the Author:

Carla Trujillo was born to a working-class family in Las Vegas, Nevada, and grew up in northern California. She has lived in the San Francisco Bay area for the past 15 years. Her extended family and roots are New Mexican (Chicana). She works as an administrator in diversity -education and advocacy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the editor of the anthology, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, which won a Lambda Book Award and the Out/Write Vanguard Award in 1992 and is now in its third printing. Her critical study, Living Chicana Theory, is in its second printing and widely used in college classrooms. What Night Brings is her first novel; excerpts from What Night Brings have already won awards from the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund and Writers at Work.

From Booklist:

*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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About this edition

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