Review by Booklist Review
"Cada cabeza es un mundo," as the Mexican dicho (saying) tells us; each person holds a world in their head. In the case of Castillo's story collection, the characters' worlds careen over, under, and around each other. From Chicago to Mexico City and other points south, these Mexicans, New Mexicans, Mexican immigrants, their descendants, and a few ghosts attempt to connect with varying levels of success. These snapshots, beginning in the 1970s and reaching to contemporary times, explore human bonds through tales dramatizing the challenges women have faced over the decades, including sexual assault, discrimination, and postpartum depression. From the brother who finds out after his sister's death that she had a secret family to the title story about a daughter sent to Mexico City to retrieve her runaway mother from her clandestine life, every character's story works out the query Castillo poses in her prologue, "Does an ant recognize the elm by the single root it so industriously scurries around?" Readers will be thrilled that Castillo has returned to fiction after her book of poetry, My Book of the Dead (2021).
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A new collection of stories from a grande dame of Chicana literature. "Being who you are isn't static," says Ada, a middle-aged nurse in the story "Ada and Pablo." She should know: Everything she thought was stable about her life in Mexico City with her husband, Pablo, has become unfamiliar, from a surprising new friendship at work with a young, handsome doctor, to physical changes wrought by menopause. Most unsettled of all is her decades-long marriage to Pablo, as rumors and suspicions swirl about his behavior. Ada is not the only character tangled in this web of secrets in Castillo's collection, comprising seven long stories and a very brief prologue. A gay man whose accomplished sister, a professor in Chicago, dies suddenly goes through her papers and learns she had a secret life in Mexico that extended far beyond what he ever could have imagined of her ("Ven"). An architect visits the site of one of his elderly father's oft-told family legends to discover the facts behind it ("Cuernavaca"). In the memorable title story, set in the mid-1970s, 18-year-old Katia, a budding feminist near the top of her Chicago high school's graduating class, is sent to Mexico by her father to retrieve her mother, who has abruptly abandoned the family. Katia, obsessed as she is with learning what being a woman truly means--how free a woman's freedom can actually be--is shocked when she arrives in Mexico and learns her mother has fallen in love with another woman. Throughout these stories, Mexico is the source of both mystery and clarity, whether through characters' histories as immigrants or children of immigrants, or because, as happens frequently, the characters in these tales must travel there, like Dorothy to Oz, to unlock knowledge which often has the potential to alter their lives. Castillo's truth-seeking characters leave an impression. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
