2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An evocative, writerly tale, February 13, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Border Dogs (Hardcover)
I didn't read this book for an education about the Border Patrol, but because I knew (from All Saints) that the author could tell an absorbing story in a style both lucid and poetic. In my opinion she succeeds beautifully here, leading us gradually to an intimacy with her characters that makes the book's eventual revelations very moving. I confess to having very little particular knowledge of border policing, but I do understand the criminal justice system and the laws governing inheritance, and found Palmer's descriptions of those processes quite precise and reliable. This is a memorable book, thoughtfully and unsentimentally conceived, exquisitely well written.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Lesson in Craft, March 6, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Border Dogs (Hardcover)
In this story of a man torn between cultures, choices, and identities, Palmer does an amazing job of continually upping the stakes for James Reese. A series of events--the escalating dangers of his job, his wife's pregnancy, and the death of his birth mother--come together to force him into a harrowing examination of his past. Palmer presents an utterly convincing male narrator whose difficulties are both global and personal. James is a character who will remain in your mind long after you've finished the book.
Furthermore, Border Dogs functions as a beautiful example of how a novel should be written, combining an almost thriller-like sense of tension with a precise yet lyric style. Palmer is both a writer's writer and a reader's writer; her novel is not only a page turner but a lesson in craft.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing second novel!, February 20, 2003
This review is from: Border Dogs (Hardcover)
I bought Border Dogs because I'd been impressed with Ms. Palmer's first novel (All Saints) and had eagerly anticipated the publication of her second. I continue to be surprised at the high literary quality of her work. This novel is set on California's boarder with Mexico, in sister-cities on opposite sides of it, and the no-mans-land between traversed by desperate illegals and the "coyotes" who guide them across. The main character is a border patrol, James Reese, who is the only child of an Anglo/Hispanic marriage. After his Hispanic father was convicted of murder, his mother put him up for adoption, and he was raised by an Anglo couple. Thus James also lives on the boarder between the Hispanic and Anglo cultures. This novel is about identity, and James is also torn between his recent marriage to a Hispanic woman and an old Anglo flame, a blond coworker who undoubtedly reminds him of his mother and the world she represents. An added complication is that he is a member of law enforcement, and this fact adds a special emphasis to the pain he inflicts on the illegals by taking them into custody and returning them to Mexico. James wrestles continually with whether his job is moral or immoral. Thus as James travels back and forth over the border, he also traverses the split in his psychic landscape trying desperately to come to terms with himself, his job and his past.
The quality of Ms. Palmer's writing is superb, even poetic. She can hold her own with the best in the business. Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Alice McDermott have nothing on her. Her descriptions at times will take your breath away, and her fluency in Spanish makes the Hispanic culture come to life with blazing reality. But the most pleasant surprise for me in this novel was Ms. Palmer's portrayal of the antagonist, an astronomer who is his Hispanic uncle. For me, he is the most powerful character in the novel, possibly because I've taught astronomy at the university level. As a scientist at a major university, James' uncle is a researcher into the mysteries of Dark Matter, a substance that makes up most of the universe, yet has eluded detection by all of NASA's telescopes. Even quantum physics makes a cameo role in the form of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal, which is used by the uncle to further cloud James' mind with what is real and unreal, what is certain and what is unknowable. The reader gets the feeling that somewhere within this astronomer's research lies the answer to James' search for his own identity.
I had to chuckle at another of the reviews of Border Dogs here on Amazon because the reviewer is a border patrol and takes exception to how they are portrayed in this novel. As an astronautical engineer, I have winced many times at how my profession is portrayed in literature, but one day I came to the realization that no one within a profession has the same experience, and the way it's viewed from outside is always strange to those within it. And of course, any human activity taken into the fictional world develops an unreal quality about it. I'm reminded that Steinbeck caught it from both migrant farm workers (Okies) and the large land owners for his portrayal of them in The Grapes of Wrath, a novel which brought Steinbeck a Nobel Prize.
Border Dogs is a marvelous novel. Any reader of serious literature will find that this is a novel to really sink your teeth into.
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