Review by Booklist Review
Chilean writer Flores' debut short story collection has garnered critical acclaim in its Spanish-language edition, winning several awards, including the Roberto Bolaño Prize. Now McDowell presents an agile translation. The nine stories feature broken, dysfunctional families in Santiago, Chile, during the 1990s when the Pinochet dictatorship continued to cast an oppressive shadow over the country. Flores depicts a lower-middle-class milieu of coastal cities, apartment buildings, and a library. The protagonists are mainly children confronting moments of lost innocence and the specter of change. A young girl accompanies her father on a hopeless job interview; a boy plots a heist with his childhood gang, and, in the final novella-length tale, Flores creates a clash between the narrator's point of view as a child versus her perspective as a grown woman who has discovered the true nature of adulthood and the barrier of social class. With conflicts personal and communal in a land in the grip of tyranny, Flores dramatizes difficult situations vividly specific and resonantly universal.--Sara Martinez Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Flores's strong debut collection provides an intimate look at characters in a Chile brimming with desperation and misfortune. The nine stories' settings range from ocean port cities to inner city projects. In each, readers see characters struggling with failures, job loss, divorce, missing parents, and poverty. In the title story, a father and his young daughters walk the streets as he desperately looks for work, only to end up humiliated when he arrives at what he thought was a job interview but is in fact a modeling agency interested in his daughters. In "Forgetting Freddy," a middle-aged woman wrestles with her failures as an adult: unable to manage a job due to depression and having been left by her long-term lover, she now lives with her mother and sees herself in the face of her mother, who was also abandoned by her partner. In even darker stories like "Talcahuano," a young boy runs wild with a gang, preparing to steal instruments from his local church. Instead, the night of the anticipated heist, he find a terrifying scene at home involving his father. With ever-changing narrative perspectives, Flores's intense stories are tied together with dark, palpable emotion, portraying characters trapped in circumstances beyond their control. This is a challenging, impressive collection. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Stories about lonely, disaffected people in contemporary Chile.The characters in Flores' debut collection are a lonely, motley bunch. They're isolated and poor; their families are dysfunctional; they yearn for something they can't always name. In "Lucky Me," Denise wants desperately to feel somethinganything. She'd lived an itinerant childhood, "and as she was living in shared rooms in other people's houses, the hope began gestating that when she finally found herself surrounded by her own things, she would feel something in her heart." But like many of the other characters, Denise is disappointed. Flores has won several prizes in her native Chile, and it's not hard to see why: Her prose (deftly translated by McDowell) is fluid and assured. But there's a sameness to these stories that can sometimes dip down into blandness. The narrators' voices are too similar; even as the characters differ in age, gender, and circumstance, each narrator sounds just like the last. Many of the tales feature children. In the title story, two young girls accompany their father to a job interview. In other stories, Flores seems to strive for a hard-edgedeven harshtone, but here, she borders on precious: "Simona was sure that her father loved her, but she could also tell that something was making him feel lonely, and that all the love she could give him didn't help." At other times, Flores runs into the opposite mistake. Trying to avoid sentimentality, she goes too far and misses out on real feeling.This collection marks the arrival of an interesting young writer, if not a fully developed one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
