Review by Booklist Review
Diné author Basham's sumptuous, mysterious debut novel reaches far into the territory of magical realism as it follows its hero, a chef, on a journey towards the sea and his own transformation. Mourning the recent death of his brother by drowning and the less recent disappearance of his parents, Damien is deep in grief and somehow, unaccountably turning into a fish. He leaves his job somewhere in the northwestern U.S. to travel by foot through deserts and mountains, until he washes up in a fishing village, apparently by the ocean in Mexico. Here, he ends up cooking for a restaurant owned by two sisters and their mother, who might all be brujas or possibly caimans or insects, and who definitely blame each other for the death of a third sister. When a hurricane threatens to destroy the village, Damien is forced to take sides. Readers willing to sacrifice a need for coherent explanations can revel in being swept away by Basham's creation of a sensually rich world in constant and often violent change.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Basham's ambitious if meandering debut finds inspiration in Navajo creation myths to tell a story of loss and family. Damien, who is Diné and a Colorado-based chef, quits his job six months after the body of his younger brother, Kai, washes ashore on the Pacific Coast, near where he'd been hiking during a storm surge. A dreamlike travel sequence ensues as Damien sets out for the coast. He drives his truck south until it breaks down, then hitchhikes and train-hops across a desert. When he arrives at a small seaside village, he's entranced by a family of women who run a local eatery. Matriarch Ana María offers Damien a job to replace her daughter, Carla, who recently died under mysterious circumstances. Once he accepts, Ana María clouds Damien's mind with her homemade mescal. Meanwhile, Carla's sisters, Marta and Paola, share with him their certainty that Ana María was involved in Carla's murder. Mixed within the narrative are elements of the fantastic, from Damien believing he is turning into a fish to Ana María's origin story in which she is a lizard. Though the many detours sap momentum, Basham shines in his depictions of Damien's yearning and catharsis. Despite the shambolic structure, readers will find much to admire in the author's unique voice. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Aug.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young Diné man fleeing a tragic past encounters an equally fraught present. Six months after his younger brother Kai's drowning death, Damien, a restaurant chef who's still wracked by grief at that loss and the earlier unexplained disappearances of his parents, quits his job and departs on a hallucinatory journey that will transport him to an environment even more discomfiting than the one he's desperate to escape. That setting is an impoverished seaside village where Damien is drawn into the complex dynamics of a family of three women--Ana María and her daughters Paola and Marta--who themselves are mourning the recent murder of their daughter and sibling, Carla. Damien goes to work in the family's makeshift food service operation on the beach, and he's soon exposed to the sisters' suspicions that their mother was involved in both Carla's death and the earlier disappearance of their father at sea. Paola and Marta try to enlist Damien in their plots and counterplots against their despised mother, who exerts a sort of domination over the village owing largely to her unexplained ability to replenish a fish supply decimated by overfishing. The clashes among these three women, who may be brujas, climax in the chaos of an apocalyptic hurricane that's described in terrifying detail. Basham's debut novel is complex and enigmatic, featuring a mythic sensibility and elements of magical realism, including the early stages of Damien's metamorphosis into a fish and other characters' taking on the physical characteristics of lizards and insects. The novel's prose is lush and evocative, and there's an almost erotic charge to Basham's writing about food, a central element in the story. He tries to give the novel a larger thematic resonance by alluding to the tragedy of the Long Walk--the dispossession of Damien's ancestors, some 10,000 members of the Navajo (Diné) tribe in the 1860s--as well as the impact of climate change. An ambitious first novel whose intriguing parts never fully come together into a satisfying whole. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
