Breaking even /

This tried-and-true story has easily recognizable characters, drawn as big and silly as soap-opera types. Val, son of a feisty hardworking beauty who is also the only Mexican woman in Big Bend, Texas, resents the town, his stepfather, and his boss at the movie drive-in. The night before his marriage to his pregnant girlfriend, he learns that his father, Frank Cooper, is not dead, as he had always been told, and Val sets out to find him. He gets sucked into Cooper's gambling life and swaggering ways. Blue, the fallen woman with the heart of gold who has hitched her star to Cooper's wagon, teaches both how to love each other and teaches Val how to be himself. Val quits gambling and makes peace with his mom, stepdad, and girlfriend. But he stays true to his dream and moves to Los Angeles to work in movies. The novel evokes the spirit of the Southwest and the tension of its mixed cultures but in a lighthearted way. (Reviewed December 15, 1997)1558852131Kevin Grandfield

Gr 9 Up‘At first glance, this novel is yet another male coming-of-age story. What sets it apart from the pack is that the hero, Valentin Cooper, is of Mexican-American heritage and his story takes place in the 1950s. Val, 18, lives in a small town in West Texas. He leaves his Mexican mother, Anglo stepfather, and pregnant girlfriend to find his father, a "nickel-plated bastard" say some, who had supposedly died a hero years before. Val's footloose quest takes him to a meeting with his father and his companion, a Reno prostitute and wanna-be singer, Blue Morgan, in an El Paso hotel. From there, Val, Frank, and Blue go on to Tahoe and then to Reno for the "big game" of high-stakes poker and a final confrontation between father and son. Val realizes that he can only be a man when he, unlike Frank, takes full responsibility for his actions. The novel's only shortcoming is a tendency for the author's prose and characterization to slide into cliché. After all, isn't the hooker with a heart of gold who seems to be "one of those lost souls who can love only men who mistreat them" someone who turns up just a bit too often?‘David A. Lindsey, Lakewood High and Middle School Libraries, WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A Mexican-American teenager comes to terms with his melting- pot heritage--in a labored and predictable picaresque tale from the author of The Dark Side of the Dream (1995). Having turned 18 and graduated from high school in 1955, Valent¡n Cooper is eager to break out of Big Bend, the West Texas whistle stop where he grew up. A film buff who hopes to make some kind of a living in Hollywood, he feels hemmed in by his loving but demanding mother Guadalupe (who owns a roadside cafe frequented by local farmers and long-haul truckers) and a pregnant Anglo girlfriend named Bonnie Gortner. Before leaving town, Val learns that the Anglo father he had been told died a hero's death before his birth is not only alive and well but an itinerant gambler who works the western US. Using information reluctantly furnished by a local lawyer, the vaguely aggrieved man-child catches up with his errant parent in El Paso. Frank Cooper proves a charming if stubbornly independent individual willing to accord his long-lost son no more than partner status. Since Frank hopes to amass the bankroll that he needs to qualify for a potentially lucrative poker game in Reno, the two tour the Sunbelt's gaming outposts. At length, there's enough money to buy Frank a seat at the card table and (unsurprisingly) give him a chance to betray his offspring's trust. At the close, Val (wise enough to appreciate that he has more than broken even on his high-stakes wager of emotion and time) spurns his deadbeat dad's appeal to join forces with him and hops a bus for Big Bend, though he'll leave again--this time for California. Self-indulgent period fiction that does little to evoke the postWW II/Korean Conflict era, let alone prove that ``the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.''