Crossing vines : a novel /

Readers who can remember the Hotel California days of Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott of the late 1960s and 1970s may feel a sense of deja vu while reading Gonzalez's insightful novel about a contemporary community of migrant grape pickers in California's Caliente Valley. Indeed, the novel's themes of the squalid living conditions, long and exhausting work hours, separation of families, and the ever-present threat of INS searches seem timeless. Gonzalez skillfully weaves these outward manifestations of the plight of the pickers into the fabric of their everyday lives, including their personal struggles with alcoholism, abuse, infidelities, and homosexuality. A group of a dozen workers who have only their cars parked in the desert to sleep in, a grandmother who picks all day and goes home each evening to a drunken and abusive husband, echoing her own mother's fate, a promiscuous wife and her jealous husband--all are bought vividly to life by Gonzalez, who perceptively ties them together, by both their family loyalties and their collective struggle to survive. --Deborah Donovan Copyright 2003 Booklist

Taking the "day-in-the-life" technique quite literally, Gonzalez (himself descended from migrant farm workers) crafts a novel about the migrant experience, with chapter headings labeled in horological sequence from 3:05 a.m. to 9:45 p.m. The day begins as it repeatedly does, with the California grape pickers and the foremen proceeding to their respective posts. Everything seems normal until the day explodes into a violent strike that culminates in bloodshed. Heir to Tomas Rivera's modern classic And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Steinbeck's masterly In Dubious Battle, this work faithfully captures the moods and atmosphere of the pickers but fails to show us characters with strong individual identities and vibrancy. Thus, the reader can't care about their plight and is caught off guard by the strike, which seems strangely gratuitous. In the end, the book is much more a slice of life than a call to political action. Recommended only for those libraries serving Hispanic communities.-Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.