The lucky ones A novel

Review by New York Times Review

JULIANNE PACHICO'S "The Lucky Ones" offers a blunt, fresh and unsentimental look inside Colombia's last 30 bloody years. She assembles a diverse cast of characters and through them we see it all: the ravages of war; the social climbing of drug-traffickers; the complicated relationships between the wellintentioned rich and the poor who serve them; the abducted who spend years as captives of a peasant Marxist movement that uses children as soldiers; the feeling of displacement and deracination among young Colombians who grow up in the United States and are now bicultural and Latino, and are still obsessed by and conflicted about their country of birth. Colombia is fertile land these days if you're searching for writing material - think of Netflix's "Narcos." "The Lucky Ones" is presented as a novel, but it feels more like a collection of interconnected stories. A few are set in New York and in Cali (Colombia's third-largest city, where the author grew up), but others take place in the part of Colombia that is mostly jungle, in the canopied camps of rogue armed groups. Pachico takes us on an enjoyable and freaky joy ride. We travel from the monkey bars in the yard of an expensive private school to the dire playgrounds of displaced children living in the city's slums. We go from a drug lord's Xanadu to streets right out of "Mad Max" ; from 20-day marches in the jungle with daily activities like Spiderweb Inspection and Toucan Watching to scoring cocaine in a parking lot in Queens with a spoiled caleñita - a young woman from Cali. Pachico's characters are all seductive, but what really drew me in is her ability to describe emotions. The book opens inside the privileged house of Stephanie Lansky, saying goodbye to her parents. She can't wait to spend the weekend on her own. By Page 5, the teenager's idea of the perfect plan turns into a horror film when a stranger rings the doorbell. She knows that he could be there to yank her away. Pachico conveys the fear that Colombian children grow up with - she made that pit in my stomach open up again. Next, she takes us deep into the jungle and inside the head of a kidnapped American teacher who, to control impending madness, resorts to teaching "Hamlet" to a class of twigs and rocks. Then, it's a love story between two outsiders in Stephanie's elite school, a scholarship boy and the chubby daughter of a drug kingpin who keeps a lion in his backyard. We then endure a chapter in which descendants of the girl's coke-addicted pet rabbits start speaking to one another. Give in to them - at the end you'll come out of this ride with a better understanding of Colombia's surreal state of affairs. Pachico provides a new view of one of the most protracted wars in the Western Hemisphere. Fifty years ago, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" defined Colombia. Today, it's Macondo mixed in with Pablo Escobar's Medellin. In the last 20 years, memoir took over Colombia's storytelling, and Pachico has made full use of it. She acknowledges a handful of books, one of them mine, and I found myself reading about my own childhood game (candy supposedly falling from the sky) played by one of her characters. I welcome pachico's voice into the club. She has combined her memories and our accounts to create a millennial's view (not a criticism!) of the complexities of Colombia, full of existential angst and funny details. This one got me laughing: Stephanie's smile filled with bits of corn that "hang down from her upper molars like vines for Tarzan." Or when she decides to call the men who can come to take her away from her Disneydecorated bubble "cheese sandwich rebels." Or when the kidnapped gringo recalls being told that going to Colombia is "special like a girlfriend you know you shouldn't be with." Go to Pachico's Colombia. The book is fragmented, just like the puzzle of the map of Colombia kept by the caleñita, a member of the monkey-bar posse who left for the United States as a child and in her 20 s still keeps an orange suitcase filled with memorabilia. When she is too homesick - and too high - she throws the puzzle on the floor. She sits there trying to make the pieces fit, but like Colombia, they never do. ? SILVANA PATERNOSTRO is the author of "My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 19, 2017]

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Review by Booklist Review

Pachico's volatile debut draws on her experience growing up in Cali, Colombia, an area fraught with paramilitary violence. Each chapter functions like a self-contained short story, capturing the sociopolitical unrest and its impact on various, intertwined lives. The tale opens in Valle del Cauca in 2003, after teenager Stephanie Lansky decides to skip a holiday getaway with her parents, and things at home turn wildly awry as her housekeeper disappears and a strange man lurks around her front gate. The scene shifts to the Amazon jungle in 2008, where an abducted schoolteacher named Mr. B struggles to save his sanity by teaching Shakespeare to a class of sticks, leaves, and rocks as a wound on his hand quickly worsens. A subsequent chapter is set in New York, where a young Colombian woman has turned to dealing drugs, unable to fully escape the vortex of her home country's turbulence. Occasionally disorienting and relentlessly rewarding, with traces of Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping (1997), Pachico's unapologetically immersive first novel brings life to a South American struggle often forgotten in global headlines.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pachico's history-bound debut novel is a carefully yet fiercely composed collage of voices that bears witness to the executions, forced disappearances, and other atrocities that took place in Colombia from 1993 to 2013 during the country's violent civil war. The book provides a searing glimpse into the conflict through 11 interconnected short stories-each focusing on a different aspect of the struggle. The novel's riveting first installment, "Lucky," takes place in 2003 and sets an ominous tone. In it, a young girl is holed up inside her family's mansion while they're away for the weekend. What she doesn't know-but begins to suspect as she hears a knock at the door-is that they're never coming back. In "Lemon Pie," one of the strongest vignettes in the book, an American former middle school teacher has been held captive by the FARC for "five years, eight months, two weeks, and five days." When not locked in a shed, he passes the time via sessions of "Parasite Squishing" and by delivering lectures from memory on Hamlet and The Scarlet Letter to his class of twigs, leaves, and trees in the Amazonian jungle. The most unique story is "Junkie Rabbit," a twisted glimpse into a rabbit warren filled with bunnies subsisting on the last remnants of coca plants from a ransacked estate. Having lived in Colombia until she turned 18, Pachico has a firsthand connection to the country's charms and troubles that shines through on every gripping page. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Set mostly in Colombia between 1993 and 2013 during the periods of guerrilla warfare and infamous drug trade, this work focuses primarily on the lives of a small group of privileged girls attending a private school. Though promoted as a novel, it is really a thematically linked collection whose episodic, fragmented structure reads more like a series of short stories. Since the protagonists are somewhat similar, individual character development is subsumed to that of an ensemble cast. Often, a minor character in an earlier episode reappears in a major role in a later one in a temporal shift that may catch readers off guard. For example, Betsy, barely mentioned early on, has moved to Washington, DC, where she is living with an escaped prisoner in the last chapter 20 years later. VERDICT By using a cross spectrum of various character types from different walks of life-rebels, teachers, adolescent girls, parents-Pachico, raised in Colombia and now living in the United Kingdom, re-creates this recently violent period of Colombian history, but her debut novel is a disjointed kaleidoscope that fails in integrating all the various components. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]-Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Set during the bloody height of the Colombian conflict and spanning more than two decades, Pachico's unforgettable whirlwind of a debut centers around the intersecting lives of a group of wealthy schoolgirls as well as the parents, teachers, and housekeepers who move in their orbit.It's 2003, and Stephanie Lansky's parents have taken off for the holiday weekend to attend a lavish party in the mountains of Cali, leaving 17-year-old Stephanieshe herself has declined the invitationunder the care of their beloved housekeeper. But one day in, and Stephanie finds the housekeeper gone, the phone lines dead, and a man with a thickly scarred face buzzing ceaselessly at the door. Now it's 2008, and Stephanie's former eighth-grade teacher, held captive in the Colombian jungle, spends his days teaching the finer points of Hamlet to a class of leaves and sticks, parasites burrowing into his arms. In Cali, a class of third graders dutifully writes condolence cards to the parents of a classmate, blown up over the mountains. In New York City, a Colombian expat has reinvented herself as an American fashion student, dealing drugs to Williamsburg hipsters and Upper West Side college boys, each tiny bag of powder carrying a remnant of the past she can't seem to escape. A little girl grows up with a pet lion in a house so opulent there's an indoor fishpond; a young man writes articles about the links between the government and the death squadrons and has his fingers axed off by masked men with machetes. Taken aloneand some have been published as suchthe chapters work as complete short stories, full worlds as vibrant and jarring as fever dreams. But together, they form something much larger, revealing a complicated and morally ambiguous web of interconnecting lives. Unsettling and pulsing with life; a brilliantly surreal portrait of life amid destabilizing violence. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Lucky 2003 VALLE DEL CAUCA Her parents and brother are spending the holiday weekend up in the mountains; they're going to a party at the Montoyas' country house. Before getting into the car her mother asks her one last time: Is she sure she doesn't want to come? Isn't she going to be bored all weekend, with only the maid around to keep her company? And she says of course not, don't be silly, and in any case the impossibly long drive on that endlessly winding road always makes her carsick (she shakes her head, sticks out her tongue, and makes a face like she can already feel the nausea). She's been there several times anyway, remembers what it's like: She's seen the automatic shampoo ­dispensers in the bathroom that fill her hands with grapefruit-­scented foam, the shiny mountain bikes that have never been ridden propped up on the porch, the indoor fishpond and the seashell-­patterned ashtrays. Her brother will run around the yard screaming with the other kids, weaving and ducking around the water fountains and angel statues, begging the gardeners to let them feed the peacocks, hold the monkey, cuddle the rabbits. She always gets so bored, sitting in a white plastic chair and batting away flies while the adults drink beer out of green glass bottles and talk, talk, talk for hours about things she either doesn't care about or doesn't understand. When she hears the word guerrilla she'll picture a group of men dressed up in gorilla suits, roaming the jungle while carrying rifles, wearing black rubber boots with yellow bottoms, and she'll have to choke back laughter to prevent Coca-­Cola from snorting out of her nose. The sinewy meat and burnt black corn from the grill always get stuck in her teeth and hang down from her upper molars like vines for Tarzan, and she'll inevitably end up prodding them with her tongue for the rest of the weekend. Mariela Montoya will be there too, of course, most likely wearing an oversized T-­shirt, glowering in the corner, sucking on the tip of her long black braid, and they'll turn away from each other gracefully without even a kiss on the cheek, let alone a greeting. Hi, Mariela, Stephanie will never say. It's been so long. How have you been? So no, she tells her mother again, but thank you very much, and she brushes strands of hair away from her eyes, smiling sweetly. "Fine, then," her mother says, a little sharply. "You're lucky Angelina was willing to cancel her weekend off and stay here instead. Was that church thing of hers tomorrow or next week?" She says this last part to her husband, who shrugs without looking up, still fiddling with the car radio knobs. One of the announcers is saying in a highly amused voice, Communist rebels? Those words don't even mean anything anymore. You might as well call them cheese sandwich rebels. Her brother makes a face at her through the car window and she makes a face right back. "Well," her mother says. "Since you're going to be here all weekend--­just keep something in mind." She glances over her shoulder at the hedge, leaves barely rustling in the wind. The sweat stains in the armpits of her pale green blouse look like tiny islands. "If the phone rings," she says, "or the doorbell sounds--­let Angelina deal with it. And make sure she tells any men who ask that we're not in the country anymore. Could you do that for me?" "What kind of men?" she asks. Her mother tucks a strand of hair behind her ears--­brown like hers, but gray at the roots. "You know what kind I mean," she says in her soft accent. So they want their revolution? the radio asks. Listen, I'll tell you what I'd do to them! Her mother's head flicks sharply toward her husband, and he quickly switches it off. After they drive away she finds her mother's cigarettes almost immediately, hidden at the bottom of one of the woven baskets Angelina brought back from her village marketplace. She smokes one under the trees by the pool, taking quick little puffs, watching carefully for Angelina at the window. What she didn't tell her mother is that she has plans to meet up with Katrina in the city center mall on Monday. Katrina's chauffeur will take them there and drop them off at the entrance, where they'll hover just long enough to make sure he's gone. Then they'll cross the highway together, ducking fast across the busy intersection, laughing and running past the wooden sticks of chicken sweating on grills and giant metal barrels of spinning brown peanuts, the clown-­faced garbage cans and men in zebra costumes directing traffic. The plan is to head to the other mall across the street, the one with the upper floors still closed off with yellow electrical tape from when the last bomb went off. On the first floor is the food court that serves Cuban sandwiches and beer in lava lamp containers. That's where the members of the football team will be, dark hair slicked back and glistening. She and Katrina are going to sit at the wooden picnic tables and yank their jeans down as far as they can go, tug at their tank tops to reveal the bra straps underneath, peach and pink and black. She has this way of crossing her legs at the ankles, tilting her head to the side, and smiling as though whatever is being said is the most interesting thing in the world and there's nowhere else she'd rather be. She'll accept their smiles, their eyes scanning her up and down, their low murmurs of approval, even the breathy whispers of Hey, beautiful, with the same icy sense of destiny that she accepts everything else in her life. Later that night, instead of going through catalogs for college applications in the United States, she sits on the couch rereading one of the Arthurian fantasy novels from her childhood. It's the kind filled with knights kneeling before queens and saying things like, My lady, perchance you have misunderstood me. Rereading kids' books is one of her sneaky, most secret treats, saved for holiday weekends or summer vacations, something that someone like Katrina has no need to ever know about. As she reads she never needs to raise her eyes to know where Angelina is or what she's doing--­the sound of her black plastic sandals slapping against the floor tiles is like a noise made by the house itself. Without looking she knows when Angelina's opening the silverware drawer, lighting the candles to chase away flies, setting the last of the dishes on the table. The radio in the kitchen crackles loudly with static, which drowns out the newscasters' gruff voices. She's turning pages rapidly, eager to arrive at the climax (the knight finally encounters the magician who blessed him with shape-­shifting skills--­or did he curse him?), when she feels a stubby finger gently tracing her scalp. "We really need to fix your hair, mija," Angelina says in that same shrill voice Stephanie's been listening to her whole life. "It's bad to have it in your eyes all the time like that." "That won't be necessary," she says, not looking up from the page. When Angelina's hands linger close to her face, she uses the book to push them away, ducking irritably from their overwhelming smell of onions and stale powdered milk. She turns a page as the sandals slap slowly back to the kitchen. During dinner she drips a giant spoonful of curry sauce onto her plate and swirls around the lettuce leaves and onion slices to make it look like she's eaten something. When she pushes the chair back from the table, Angelina is already there, reaching for her plate with one hand and squeezing the flesh on her lower arm with the other. "My God but you're skinny!" Angelina says in the same high-­pitched shrill. "Eat more! How are you going to fight off men?" "Could you please not touch me?" she says, jerking her arm away, but the tiny nugget of pleasure that's formed inside her just from hearing the word skinny is already giving off warmth. Angelina says something else, speaking in a low voice this time, but her words are muffled beneath the trumpets of the national anthem blasting from the kitchen radio, in its usual slot just before the news. "What?" she says, but Angelina's already abruptly turned away, her white apron swirling through the air like a cape. "Don't worry about it, mija," Angelina says, not looking back. "It's nothing." She doesn't wake up till midmorning. Because Katrina won't be coming by until Monday, she doesn't shave her legs and wears a baggy pair of yellow basketball shorts instead of jeans. The day is already uncomfortably hot. She heads outside to the pool and smokes a cigarette under the grapefruit tree, careful to stand in the shade to protect her skin. It never feels like a holiday weekend to her until she's smoked, until she gets that jumpy feeling in her stomach that makes her want to stand very still. Back in the kitchen, she opens the refrigerator and drinks directly from the pitcher of lemonade, careful not to bang her teeth against the ceramic. As she puts the pitcher on the counter there's a loud blast of the doorbell. It echoes through the house, followed by six blunt buzzes, as though it's a signal she should recognize. "Angelina!" she calls out. She waits but there's no sound of sandals slapping against the floor tiles, heading to the front door. The buzzing is long and sustained this time. "Christ," she says. "Angelina!" When she was very young she would stand in the middle of a room and scream Angelina's name over and over again, not stopping until Angelina came running, apron flying out behind her, but that's not the kind of silly, immature thing she would do now. She takes another long swig of lemonade to hide her cigarette breath, just in case it's one of her mother's friends. It would be just like her mother to send someone to check up on her. As she walks down the hallway it's hard to decide what feels worse, the damp cloth of the T-­shirt sticking to her armpits or the sweaty bare skin of her collarbones. At the front door she runs her fingers through her hair, tucking it carefully behind her ears. Sometimes when she's standing in the sunlight, if she tilts her head just right she can almost pass for blond. Excerpted from The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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