- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Free Press (Jun 1 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1439170800
- ISBN-13: 978-1439170809
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 3.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#493,650 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #66 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Hispanic
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
Winnerof the Pen/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
"Skyhorse is at his best when exploring the changing world of Echo Park...His careful attention to detail, to a rich past of a place that served as home to Mexican Americans already once displaced from Chavez Ravine, is thoroughly researched and executed-- no easy feat while juggling multiple characters and timeframes...the focus on Mexican American characters is admirable." —The Los Angeles Times
"To embrace a community, to capture its fabric, to syncopate its rhythms, lives, views and experiences is a difficult feat. But Brando Skyhorse manages to do just that with his breathtaking and, at times, soul-churning novel...Skyhorse [finds] breadth and diversity in Echo Park...Stories zigzag through the book, introducing lives unique and full, bisecting one another at times, standing at solitary edges at others...we are carried away by this intricately crafted tale. Taken together, the tales spin around the axis of a few streets yet splinter off into infinite dimensions." —Chattanooga Times Free Press
“A revelation…the summer’s most original read…extraordinary…The novel is richly detailed, offering varying perspectives that collide into a singular narrative from an evolving neighborhood in the shadow of downtown L.A. (Think Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez fused with Junot DÍaz.)…The immigrant experience may very well be the defining narrative of the United States in the 21st century. When juxtaposed against its literary rival, the self-confession, the results can be breathtaking as exhibited by Skyhorse’s startling author’s note at the start of the book…powerful.” —Examiner.com
"Rich and textured...As the intricate tale unwinds, we're offered glimpses of...eight residents, whose ordinary, working-class lives intersect under often extraordinary circumstances...Skyhorse propels the reader through the novel at a breakneck pace. And in each section, readers are rewarded with a deeper layer, and a new connection, that enriches the plot...Skyhorse uses elegant prose and vivid storytelling to tackle questions surrounding culture, belonging, and identity that haunt every immigrant community." —The Christian Science Monitor
"If timeliness and social relevance don't sell you on the book, then read it for its beautifully imperfect characters, the wise certainty of its prose, its satisfying emotional heft…Elegantly written...The book cleverly expresses the tangled nature of multicultural identity and the physical geography of off-the-grid Echo Park." —The Brooklyn Rail
"Skyhorse is at his best when exploring the changing world of Echo Park...His careful attention to detail, to a rich past of a place that served as home to Mexican Americans already once displaced from Chavez Ravine, is thoroughly researched and executed-- no easy feat while juggling multiple characters and timeframes...the focus on Mexican American characters is admirable." —The Los Angeles Times
"To embrace a community, to capture its fabric, to syncopate its rhythms, lives, views and experiences is a difficult feat. But Brando Skyhorse manages to do just that with his breathtaking and, at times, soul-churning novel...Skyhorse [finds] breadth and diversity in Echo Park...Stories zigzag through the book, introducing lives unique and full, bisecting one another at times, standing at solitary edges at others...we are carried away by this intricately crafted tale. Taken together, the tales spin around the axis of a few streets yet splinter off into infinite dimensions." —Chattanooga Times Free Press
“A revelation…the summer’s most original read…extraordinary…The novel is richly detailed, offering varying perspectives that collide into a singular narrative from an evolving neighborhood in the shadow of downtown L.A. (Think Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez fused with Junot DÍaz.)…The immigrant experience may very well be the defining narrative of the United States in the 21st century. When juxtaposed against its literary rival, the self-confession, the results can be breathtaking as exhibited by Skyhorse’s startling author’s note at the start of the book…powerful.” —Examiner.com
"Rich and textured...As the intricate tale unwinds, we're offered glimpses of...eight residents, whose ordinary, working-class lives intersect under often extraordinary circumstances...Skyhorse propels the reader through the novel at a breakneck pace. And in each section, readers are rewarded with a deeper layer, and a new connection, that enriches the plot...Skyhorse uses elegant prose and vivid storytelling to tackle questions surrounding culture, belonging, and identity that haunt every immigrant community." —The Christian Science Monitor
"If timeliness and social relevance don't sell you on the book, then read it for its beautifully imperfect characters, the wise certainty of its prose, its satisfying emotional heft…Elegantly written...The book cleverly expresses the tangled nature of multicultural identity and the physical geography of off-the-grid Echo Park." —The Brooklyn Rail
Product Description
We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours.
With these words, spoken by an illegal Mexican day laborer, The Madonnas of Echo Park takes us into the unseen world of Los Angeles, following the men and women who cook the meals, clean the homes, and struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream.
When a dozen or so girls and mothers gather on an Echo Park street corner to act out a scene from a Madonna music video, they find themselves caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. In the aftermath, Aurora Esperanza grows distant from her mother, Felicia, who as a housekeeper in the Hollywood Hills establishes a unique relationship with a detached housewife.
The Esperanzas’ shifting lives connect with those of various members of their neighborhood. A day laborer trolls the streets for work with men half his age and witnesses a murder that pits his morality against his illegal status; a religious hypocrite gets her comeuppance when she meets the Virgin Mary at a bus stop on Sunset Boulevard; a typical bus route turns violent when cultures and egos collide in the night, with devastating results; and Aurora goes on a journey through her gentrified childhood neighborhood in a quest to discover her own history and her place in the land that all Mexican Americans dream of, "the land that belongs to us again."
Like the Academy Award–winning film Crash, The Madonnas of Echo Park follows the intersections of its characters and cultures in Los Angeles. In the footsteps of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie, Brando Skyhorse in his debut novel gives voice to one neighborhood in Los Angeles with an astonishing— and unforgettable—lyrical power.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Strong new voice,
By
This review is from: The Madonnas of Echo Park: A Novel (Hardcover)
The Madonnas of Echo Park is Brando Skyhorse's debut novel. It wasn't a book I'd heard of so I started read without any preconceived notions. I was so glad I read the author's notes in the beginning - it absolutely captured me. Brando grew up in Echo Park, a ethnically diverse neigbourhood in Los Angeles. The novel sprang from an interaction he had at a 6th grade class dance party. Aurora Esperanza asks Brando to dance to the first song - Madonna's Borderline. He declines, but with the phrase "I can't dance with you - you're a Mexican." When he returns to school the next week, he is ready to apologize, but Aurora is gone. When he asks his teacher " How am I going to apologize to her?", she replies "You'll have to find another way to do it." Twenty five years later - here is the apology - the fictional book, The Madonnas of Echo Park. Now ironically - Brando's mother brought him up to believe his biological father was native, not Mexican. He was unaware of this until later in life.The novel is a series of short stories, with each linked to the next. It begins with Aurora's estranged father waiting for day labour. We see the neighbourhood of Echo Park through his eyes. The story then segues through seemingly unrelated stories - a bus ride gone very wrong, a woman who believes she has seen the Virgin Mary, a young girl shot down as she dances to Madonna music on a street corner, and more until we 'meet' Aurora in the last chapter. The links are sometimes very surprising, jumping out and heading in a direction you least expect. (Madonna did film the video for Borderline in Echo Park) Brando brings this neighbourhood to life and the characters, locale and dialogue have the ring of authenticity. The stories are powerful and some are unsettling. The fourth story, Rules of the Road, is about Efren, a Mexican born naturalized American who starts a race war after inadvertently killing a black man. His mind set and determination to follow the rules was unsettling. Skyhorse presents many different voices and outlooks, male and female, all with equal talent. This was a completely different read for me, but I really enjoyed it. A really strong debut novel. The follow up - Things My Fathers Taught Me - about life with 5 stepfathers - should be an interesting read as well. And did the 'real' Aurora ever read the book? Brando did meet and talk to her, but wasn't sure if she would read the book.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.2 out of 5 stars (24 customer reviews) 31 of 34 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Justify My Love for this novel,
By C. Hokanson - Published on Amazon.com
I picked up this new novel a few days ago not really knowing what to expect. It's a real winner. Jump on the bandwagon now so you can say you discovered this new writer before he hits it big time. At the center of the interlocking stories in this book is a tragic drive-by shooting that happens in Echo Park in LA at a street corner where Chicana and Mexican women and girls are gathered dancing to the groove of Madonna's "Borderline"--which had the classic chola-inspired video on MTV. I really enjoyed all the pop culture references from the 80s and 90s and I hadn't really thought before about how and why American pop music is embraced by ethnic minorities. I got a really vivid sense of what living in a ethnically diverse neighborhood of LA is like and throughout the stories, characters cross paths in very powerful and moving ways. I'd love to see Iñárritu make a film of this book. The novel is really beautifully written and crafted. I reread some sentence and paragraphs for the pleasure of experiencing them again. I feel like rereading the book again so I can catch all the subtleties I missed the first time.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Journey of Discovery,
By ubi sunt - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Madonnas of Echo Park: A Novel (Hardcover)
The Madonnas of Park had me from page one. An intriguing epigraphical poem by Jeff G. Lytle ushers in Skyhorse's fictional author's note, a piece of writing that showcases an effortless style (complete with lots of fun eighties-culture references), a knack for storytelling, and a deep knowledge of both his characters and the world they live in. I fell in love with Skyhorse in his author's note and experienced a whole other range of emotions as I progressed through the chapters: shock, grief, amusement, admiration, hope. His widely varied cast of characters offers many views of a culture within a neighborhood, all of them humanitarian and revelatory. I particularly liked how each chapter was told from a different perspective (all of the voices eerily convincing), with Aurora's and Felicia's stories laced throughout to serve as a backbone for the book.His sweeping descriptions reminded me of Steinbeck, and his subtle, plentiful details were reminiscent of the texture in Wes Anderson's film "The Royal Tenenbaums" and Baz Luhrmann's film "Moulin Rouge"--films you can watch a hundred times and still pick up on things you'd missed in previous viewings. Skyhorse has a memoir coming out next year. Needless to say, I'll be first in line to buy it. 19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Left wanting more,
By Katherine Allan "Kaggy" - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Madonnas of Echo Park: A Novel (Hardcover)
While reading "Madonnas of Echo Park" I felt like I once lived in Echo Park and knew all the prople. Now that I have finished the book I miss the neighborhood. I even went on "MTV" to view the Madonna video the story mentions.Brando Skyhorse's use of English is masterful and with his perfect words he paints each character and setting so lovingly that they glow with life. I recommend this novel to anyone wanting to fall in love with another time and place not so far away. |
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