Review by Booklist Review
Rubio's stunning debut short story collection is grounded in atavism while catapulting readers into a near future soaked in twenty-first-century magic realism. A community college brujería class, an opening salvo on "the country once known as the United States," and tales featuring trained pigeons and jaguars and a pueblo re-emerging after the big one (the Orion earthquake) are just a few of Rubio's bewitching scenarios. While most of the stories are set in Southern California, a few reach farther afield to Brazil and New Orleans while featuring primarily female protagonists--mothers, sisters, friends, aunts, and cousins--ferociously celebrating feminine power. Rubio confects her moving, disturbing, and intense stories in a variety of styles, voices, and tones, from dark parody to heart-wrenching, grotesque, and violent yet touching. Adorned with illustrations of powerful simplicity, her stories feature shape-shifters, anthropomorphic animals, over-the-top celebrities (reminiscent of singer Paquita la del Barrio), witches, and mediums rooted in Mexican tropes, images, and language. One of Rubio's characters declares, "It's not time travel, pendeja." Libraries beware: mischievous Rubio exhorts readers to add their own drawings to blank pages to fully engage and feel the joy of creation.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mysticism and imagination run wild in Rubio's debut collection, which showcases glittering prose and a fearless approach to form and imagery. Many of these 10 tales defy categorization and blur genre boundaries. A duo searches the multiverse to find meaning in senseless death in "Carlos Across Space and Time." "Brujería for Beginners" sees a magical teacher attempting to steer an unruly class. Generations of Marias work to make sense of their legacies and supernatural abilities within a dystopic jungle in "Maria, Maria." Strongest are "Tijuca," which captures the essence of grief as a widow cares for her husband's remains, and "Burial," which gives loneliness teeth as a young girl resurrects a saber-toothed tiger. Some of the more experimental works falter, however; both "Paint by Numbers" and "Art Show" privilege style over substance or clarity. Still, Rubio's talent is evident, and there's such a range of tones and genres on offer that any reader will find at least something to enjoy. Agent: Monica Odom, Odom Media Management. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT "There's always a price for conjuring in darkness," explains the instructor in "Brujería for Beginners," which opens this iridescent first collection from former PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow Rubio. "You won't always know what it is until payment is due." Purveying characters (both women and animals) with otherworldly powers, Rubio steps across the thin border between life and a dangerous beyond to consider what such payments might entail. For instance, a woman following strict ritual when agreeing to bury her deceased husband's head in his native Brazil plans to break her promise to remain with him and instead return to California. But does she? In the ambitious title novella, 12-year-old Maite (Maria Teresa) loses her celebrity psychic mother LaZuli (Maria Lucia) in a climate-devastated near-future and eventually meets her mother's estranged twin (Maria Caracol), whose Book of Marias traces their heritage back to a time when the Moon intervened to protect animals from the Sun. Involving a near-sacrifice and ending in a battle between a blue jaguar and the golden crocodile, the narrative sometimes overreaches but remains a lush tour de force. VERDICT A vividly accomplished debut.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Magical realism and myth meet dystopic themes in this debut collection of short fiction set in the Americas. Set against a backdrop of political inequities, climate catastrophes, and other crises, Rubio's stories offer alternative ways of squaring injustices (or getting revenge), beginning with "Brujería for Beginners," a second-person, instructional story about learning "spiritual vigilantism or expedited karma." "Calling it black magic," the teacher insists, "is devoid of context," especially when the context in question is domestic abuse. Similarly, in "Tunnels," the Fogata family, fed up with the racism and violence in 1990s California, hatches up a plot to release pigeons emitting powerful electromagnetic pulses that bring the entire Southwest to a grinding halt. A magic mirror that transports the viewer to other versions of life allows the narrator of "Carlos Across Time and Space," one of the collection's standouts, to picture a different death for Carlos, who was senselessly murdered at a high school graduation party. Magical possibilities compete with reason and often win, especially for characters who are ill-served by what society serves up for them. In "Burial," another fine story, a girl who is an outcast at school because she once tried to save a hummingbird is saved twice by tigers. Rubio is an extravagant storyteller; her prose thrums with life, and her plots take hairpin turns. All of this is on full display in "Maria, Maria," a sweeping story that leaps backward and forward in time and from perspective to perspective as it traces the fates of three women all the way back to a mythic world. Except for a few of the more formally experimental stories ("Art Show" and "Paint by Numbers") that fall flat, this is transporting work. Sprawling magical realistic stories with a moral bent. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
