“Atmospheric, intelligent, and well informed: an impressive debut.” olga dies dreaming
OLGA DIES DREAMING
who parlayed a small stash of gold into a thriving business. And Laila, escaping her abusive husband, is descended from Luyu, a Miwok woman who’s absorbed White people’s condescension or brutality. Bouncing among the characters in brief chapters, Evison gives the story a sprightly, page-turner feel despite the sizable cast he’s assembled. And the story thrives because his eye for the particulars of each character’s life is so sharp: Finn’s work on farms and railroads, Laila’s anxiety over escaping her husband, Malik’s mother’s desperate efforts to make ends meet for her son’s sake. So when their lives do wind up intersecting on the train, Evison’s novel feels less like we’re-all-connected sentimentality than a compassionate vision of a pluralistic country that ought to dignify everybody. Though politics aren’t explicit in the novel, it’s plainly a response to an era that’s created dividing lines across the country. Without being simplistic or wearing rose-colored glasses, Evison suggests a fresh way of recognizing our relationships without melting-pot clichés. A bighearted, widescreen American tale.
Gonzalez, Xochitl Flatiron Books (384 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 11, 2022 978-1-250-78617-3
THE NIGHT WILL BE LONG
Gamboa, Santiago Trans. by Andrea Rosenberg Europa Editions (368 pp.) $18.00 paper | Nov. 23, 2021 978-1-60945-711-2
y o u n g a d u lt
Warmhearted but tough-minded story of a sister and brother grappling with identity, family, and life goals in gentrifying Brooklyn. Olga and Prieto Acevedo grew up in Sunset Park, in one of the first Puerto Rican families to move into a then-White working-class neighborhood. Now Olga lives in a Fort Greene high-rise and is a very high-end wedding planner. Prieto is back in the family house with his grandmother after a divorce; he’s a congressman fighting for his district—except when he’s shifting his vote at the behest of the Selby brothers, sinister real estate developers who have compromising photos of very closeted Prieto having sex with a man. The siblings both have bad consciences about having compromised the ideals of their mother, a radical activist for Puerto Rican
In a remote stretch of southwestern Colombia, Bogota-based journalist Julieta Lezama investigates an ultraviolent confrontation that officials pretend never happened. Before mysteriously disappearing, an orphaned 14-yearold boy who witnessed the clash tells the 40-ish, trash-talking Julieta how the confrontation ended with a black-attired figure emerging from a bazooka-ed Hummer and escaping in a helicopter. Everyone else in town claims they didn’t see or hear anything. All evidence of the confrontation is cleared away. With her assistant, Johana, a veteran of the FARC guerrilla group, Julieta determines that a simmering Mafia-like conflict between a Pentecostal church and an evangelical one had something to do with the roadside drama. The story leads Julieta to French Guiana and Brazil and intense one-on-ones with the churches’ corrupt pastors—who, for all their dark edges, win her over with their charisma. Each of them gets to tell his anguished story in long, italicized sections that touch on the “perverse republic” that is Colombia. “When a person screams into the darkness, what reply is possible?” one of them asks. For all that, the book is lifted by its cutting humor, which takes on a dreamy, almost surreal quality. The deeper Julieta gets into the case, the more she drinks, happily aware of what she’s doing. For the prosecutor she’s working with, the more bodies pile up, the giddier he gets in urging her on. Gamboa can go so deep into a character, such as a pastor obsessed with gold, that he loses the thread of the main narrative. But the book never loses the spark of originality. An absorbing—at times almost too absorbing—mystery by a notable Colombian author. |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 october 2021
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11
