This was a late addition to our reading pile thanks to the Morris nod and a presence on one of the year-end lists. It’s not an easy book to track down; I struck out at a few bookstores and the local library system (where it is owned but in single digits). But I finally got my hands on it and read it in just a few hours.

And I’m a little underwhelmed. It’s a lovely book, and I think it’s an important one: there are not enough books like this, in which a Mexican-American family lives their life, and the focus is not on assimilation or immigration but on the family, and their duality (Mexican/American, Spanish/English) shapes them but isn’t the whole story by a long shot.

Instead, this is about love and loss and family, important and universal themes.

But it’s thin. [Read more...]