La maravilla /

Vea, a San Francisco attorney, grew up in surroundings distinctly similar to those of young Beto, featured in this enchanting and powerful first novel. The family's adobe hut is situated on a dusty Arizona road; where the boy's early years are nurtured by his loving, high-spirited Yaqui Indian grandfather, Manuel, and his grand~mother, Josephina, a Mexican woman of Spanish descent whose revered Catholicism incorporates her curandera's spells and healing invocations. Beto's life unfolds in a desert community of many cultures--Chinese and African American--where he witnesses the magical practices of his beloved grandparents and the miseries, triumphs, and endurance of neighbors. Unforgettable characterizations and potent storytelling make this a magical journey of impressive scope. ~--Alice Joyce

Evoking the magical realism of Latin American literature, this unconventional but compelling first novel centers on a young Mexican-American boy and his grandparents, an Indian whose spirit soars outside his body and a Catholic witch doctor who keeps a jar of mystical oils next to her silver crucifix. The poor Arizona desert town that Beto and his abuelitos call home during the late 1950s is a multicultural Arcadia. Here black, white, Native American, Mexican and Chinese families--not to mention transvestites, prostitutes and a madwoman who recites the poetry of Andrew Marvell to her dogs--live in perfect harmony and mutual respect. Only a murder of passion and the reappearance of a long-lost dog named Apache mar this desert idyll. According to Beto's visionary grandmother, Josephina, whose gift for magic loosely stitches this scattered tale together, the dog is a maravilla , a creature who escorts the spirits from the land of the living to the underworld. Apache's return presages a death that spurs Beto toward maturity, as he learns reverence for his Native American forebears. Though the narrative line is tenuous and sometimes abruptly disjointed, Vea's shimmering prose, colorful characters and vivid imagery are as impressive as Josephina's dreams. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Marigolds, the flowers of the goddesses, and an old dog, the herald of completion, give the Spanish title to this first novel of magic, deep love, and grinding poverty in a neglected edge of Phoenix. At its center is Beto, a fatherless, prematurely wise boy, and his abuelitos (``grandparents''), Spanish Catholic Josephina and Yaqui Manuel. They live on Buckeye Road, a place of peculiar racial harmony born of solidarity in poverty. Their neighbors in this Cadillac graveyard and tarpaper community include young Boydeen, living scarred under a porch and speechlessly writing down all she hears; and mournful prostitute Vernetta, whose abundant flesh diminishes with her lost son's return. Many fascinating characters with singular, sometimes fantastic stories both enliven and crowd this sorrowful, entertaining, erratic novel. A good choice for adventurous readers.-- Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From attorney and onetime migrant farmworker Véa, a bewitching debut based on childhood memories of a squatters' settlement outside 1950's Phoenix. Most multicultural stories pale next to nine-year-old Beto's boyhood in the desert with his Spanish-born grandmother--who struggles to reconcile her curing powers with Catholicism--and his pagan Yaqui grandfather--who can leave his body and fly. Okies, Arkies, African-Americans, Indians who sing Irish railroad songs, transvestites, prostitutes, the Chinese grocer and cook regard each other with suspicious curiosity. Even the Fuller Brush man here is an outsider: a mutilated concentration-camp survivor. All fling about racial stereotypes but can never get away from shared food and music, mutual respect, love. (The Mighty Clouds of Joy Church allows even sinners to tap into its electrical service; the whole community is connected by extension cords.) People live in cardboard houses and junked cars, but much of the novel is very funny; and when people do suffer, it's not from their material poverty: White Vernetta became a prostitute out of sorrow following the lynching-murder of her black/Filipino boyfriend; jealousy leads to crimes of passion; people struggle with remorse for failings toward God and man. Meanwhile, Véa's cross-cultural translations weave enchantment as Beto's grandparents initiate him into values meant to sustain him in materialistic, nontribal mainstream USA. Véa's uneasy mix of magic realism, essay, tragedy, broad comedy, and didactic speech never quite blends, but each element- -like the different races thrown together in the desert--forms an integral part of this astonishing fictionalized tribute.