Customer Reviews

The Guardians: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Reading Ana Castillo's The Guardians turned out to be a difficult experience. She weaves four different Mexican-American voices around each other and attempts to bring cohesion to her story.

The four - Regina, a woman as determined to hold on to her past as she is to see her nephew have a future; Gabo, a sixteen year old boy fighting to cope with a lifetime of loss believing his only choices are the church or the gangs; Miguel, a disillusioned schoolteacher with a somewhat atypical divorce situation and Miguel's grandfather Milton, mostly deaf and half-blind, caught up in the memories of a revolutionary past - are united by the disappearance of Regina's brother (and Gabo's father) Rafa, who has made the crossing between Mexico and the United States several times, but failed to return to the United States this last time.

The main difficulty with this book was the very distracting language issue. Ana Castillo allows all her characters to speak in a hybrid of English and Spanish, which may make sense to persons with a background in Spanish, but kept breaking me out of the flow of the story to the point where I began skipping over words by the time I got to the middle of the book. I can appreciate the use of the hybrid language as a literary device, but just don't think the author achieved her intention here.

Additionally, while her characters are quite distinct, their voices definitely are not. At times it was difficult to distinguish who was speaking when moving from one perspective to another. Sometimes I found myself in the middle of a chapter before I realized the character had changed.

On the whole The Guardians was a moving and beautiful story that at times would leap out of the language issue with a startling clarity, but which mostly got lost. This was the first of Ana Castillo's books that I have read, and despite the difficulties I had with it, I would probably try another of her books to see if I could find more of her storytelling ability.

Ana Castillo's "The Guardians" is a powerful story told through the eyes of four likable and convincingly honest protagonists: Regina, Gabo, Miguel, and Milton. The book opens with Regina, a widowed teacher's aide struggling to get by, living in a small border town in New Mexico. A strong, independent woman, Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo. Gabo, who is in the US illegally, is an honest, hardworking boy, who lives his life solely for the Church. While his Tía Regina fears that he is being brainwashed by his "spiritual advisor," she also knows things could be worse, since gangs and drug dealers are ubiquitous in the area.

While crossing the border illegally several years ago, Gabo's mother was murdered by "coyotes," or people traffickers, who were paid to bring her to the US. Her body was found mutilated, with its organs removed for sale on the black market. Now that Gabo's father, Rafa, has disappeared while crossing over from Mexico, Regina and Gabo begin a search for clues as to what happened to him, while fearing the worst.

Seeking advice, Regina approaches Miguel Betancourt, a recently divorced teacher at the school where Regina works. He tracks down the address of a house in El Paso that the coyotes are using, and Regina, Gabo, Miguel, and his grandfather Milton are soon dragged into an exciting and dangerous search for clues leading to Rafa.

Castillo brilliantly shows readers that the political, highly charged issue of immigration is not as black and white as the evening news often portrays it to be. She poetically illustrates to her readers the less-seen gray area of regular people searching for a better life, while not shying away from the realities and horrors of the drug and people trafficking gangs who control the borderlands.

i expected to like this novel. The cover blurbs are great and the themes are urgent. Unfortunately, the novel itself veers between long stretches of dreadful plotlessness, highly improbable events that (finally) drive the plot forward, and seemingly endless pages filled with characters' musings to themselves.

It's not as if Ana Castillo's topics aren't engaging. She's telling a story about a family living on and fractured by the Mexican-American border. The characters include a man who vanished crossing the border with coyotes to rejoin his sister and son in the U.S. Years before, coyotes separated him from his wife, harvested her organs, and left her lying dead in the desert. The man's surviving son dreams of becoming a priest and finding his father as he navigates a gang-infested school. His guardian aunt, a teacher's aide, dreams of starting a business and relaxes by working in her garden. The aunt has body issues and is still a virgin since she did not consummate her marriage the day before her husband was sent overseas and killed in the military.

Castillo's didacticism is pronounced and inescapable. Characters constantly provide the details of their pasts and their reactions to current events in long monologues. Two of the main characters are schoolteachers and one of the teachers mourns how little the young people know about their own past. And so, the readers receive Castillo's history lessons and opinions about Mexican-American politics throughout the book.

The author's politics are equally unavoidable. Characters muse that we are brothers and sisters on both sides of the border and there should be no restrictions on people traveling north for economic reasons. Castillo's characters never consider the effect that the influx of low-wage, low-skill workers has on the job market and the wages and opportunities of Americans who are also trying to make a living working minimum wage jobs. She bolsters her opinions by having God himself provide a miraculous vision to two of her characters. Heavy-handed to say the least.

All in all, Castillo submits her readers to a tendentious session of proselytizing that often feels like a diatribe. One wishes the author was better able to make the truly pressing border issues come alive for her readers.

The best thing I can say about this book is that I finished it. Normally, if a book doesn't grab me within the first 50 pages, I allow myself to set it aside and move on. Unfortunately, I received an ARC that I promised to review so I felt an obligation to finish.

The characters were one-dimensional archetypes - the spinster, the teenage boy torn between god and the devil (in the form of his buddies in a gang), the bumbling do-gooder/hero, etc. That would have been acceptable if the story arc was compelling. However, I found the multiple narrator voices distracting, the relationships between the characters lacking emotion, and the plot stretched thin. It felt like the book started as a short story but somewhere along the way the author tried to turn it into a full length novel without really adding any content.

I have lived in both California and Texas and was able to manage most of the Spanish words without trouble. But, it felt like the author was experimenting with a literary exercise. It was more like Spanglish - adding El before random English words, for example. Do people really talk like this? No Mexicans I know do, regardless of how long they've lived in the US.

In the end, I just didn't find the characters or the story believable, enlightening, or compelling. I probably wouldn't pick up anything by the author again,and wouldn't recommend her to others.

The premise of this book promised to be something that was right up my alley. And it would have been had I like any of the characters.

The style was trying to be reminiscent of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, what with each character getting to speak in their own voice. However, it seemed to me that none of the characters were ever fleshed out enough to carry this style.

I went into the book knowing that the author was going to use some Spanish terms throughout. However, I found the liberal use of Spanish phrases to hinder my understanding of what was going on at times. I should not have to interrupt my reading to go to Babel Fish and translate sections, just to comprehend what is happening. Using this motif leaves a large segment of the population out of the loop. While it may be intentional on Castillo's part, seeing as how her experience in America is vastly different from my own, I still feel that by leaving so many out of the loop will continue to shrink her readership. I will definitely think twice about picking up another book of hers, not just due to the language barrier but also to the overall flat characterizations, fuzzy plotlines, and general sloppiness of writing presented here.

I'm on a binge for books from home in El Paso. Not too many novels set there like the Guardians by Castillo. I don't want to dislike books by my own. To tell the truth though, I was put off from the second (the "segundo", in this speak) the narrator said "los" Franklins, "la" Winnie, and "el" Shur Sav. Language stunts playing to a crowd which is not Chicano (not paseños especially--nobody talks a bogus Spanish or Spanglish there, anywhere I say but I'm born and raised there, went to "la" Jeff even) but to impress others how cool the author is with the argot of the gente. The rest of the story feels the same, the characters stick figures to make sentimental political talking points, not people who live there. The father character was especially a fantasy character.

Plainly not written through personal life, not even good research seemed to be done to write the novel. I don't disagree with Castillo's politics or Chicanísma, only her way of expressing it. Didactic I think it is called, heavy-handed. I will try another by her, annoying as I found the Guardians to be.

Ana Castillo's new novel The Guardians is set against a landscape rich in history and culture yet torn apart by some of today's biggest social dilemmas. The US-Mexican border towns of Cabuche and Juarez and the unforgiving desert that separates them are the backdrop for the story of Regina and her teenage nephew Gabriel and the search for Rafa - Regina's brother, Gabo's father - who has disappeared while illegally crossing the border. The search for Rafa leads to new friendships and crises and explores the effects that the trafficking of humans and drugs has on the lives of ordinary people. The narrative is told in the first-person by four characters: Regina, Gabriel, Miguel, and Miguel's grandfather, Milton. Miguel, a teacher at the school where Regina works, becomes an ally, as does his grandfather. Regardless of the geography, the lives, hopes, dreams and fears of these four people are not only believable, but also easy to relate to, making this a touching, witty and beautiful story.

As a first-time reader of Castillo's work, I was enthralled with her unique style of writing. Her mixture of English and Spanish is initially a bit uncomfortable until the storytelling takes over. For readers with no knowledge of Spanish this may make the going difficult, but, in most cases, the narrative itself allows the reader to deduce the translation. Ms. Castillo's writing style reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her cadence is lively yet almost poetic, rich in insight yet spoken in an everyman voice.

The Guardians is a moving, suspenseful and engaging novel about family, justice and injustice. It's the story of Regina, a widow and de facto parent of Gabo, a spiritual but troubled teen aged boy whose father, Regina's brother, has disappeared crossing the border from Mexico to America. Regina determines to help Gabo learn what happened to his father and into the mix falls Miguel, a divorced activist attracted to Regina and his tart-tongued grandfather Milton. The characters come from varied circumstances and have different agendas but they all believe in family and in helping each other, and they all want what's best for Gabo, something that he himself does not understand. The narrative mixes varied perspectives and shows how individuals' lives are affected by the larger sweep of history, the desperate things they will do to survive and how little things change for an underclass pushed past the margins.

The Guardians: who are they? And who is protecting who in this world of atrocities? What grave responsibility is it on the shoulders of those who sincerely want to save the world from more tragic deterioration?
As always and as her writing habit goes, Ana Castillo in her latest novel forces her readers to consider seriously these issues not only as they are taking place at the Mexican-American borders but also as they are taking place worldwide.
Ana's novel--The Guardians--is not a work of fiction; it is a document and a manifesto against the violations committed by the new pirates of the 21st C. who found their power on crushing the unprivileged.
Ana dedicates her book to the "underclass throughout the world" hoping that everyone will get equal rights to live with dignity. Her words are an out loud cry--hopefully not in the wilderness--one that would wake our conscientiousness and love to the needy.
Simply put, No love, No conscientiousness: No hope in a long-lived civilization.

The story is told through the four main characters: Regina, a fifty-ish, down-to-earth, attractive and very family and history-bound widow who always seems to have a "get rich" scheme going; Gabo, her 16 year-old nephew, who is smart, well-read and converses with God; Miguel, a divorced teacher and community activist and his grandfather Milton, who has a long a varied history as a soldier in WWII and a cantina owner. The story is set in the border area where New Mexico and Texas share the border with Mexico. The story conflict is created when Regina's brother and Gabo's father disappears, who is a migrant worker living in the border area where illegally crossing the border is a common occurrence even though it is a dangerous undertaking. Regina enlists Miguel's help to determine the fate of her brother.

This is a powerful story with a very timely subject matter. I like the author's choice of telling the story through the first person narrative of the four different characters. This can be tricky, but it was done beautifully here and the distinct voices come through and slowly form a real image in the reader's mind for each character as the story progresses. Regina, also referred to by Gabo as the "Queen" (very apropos since she studied Latin as a little girl and that is what Regina translates to) embodies the earthly family-connected while Gabo represents the spiritual connection of the people (here the author chose conversations with God) and Miguel, who represent the revolutionary political activist while Milton provides us with the historical context of the Mexicans living in the border area.

I liked the interspersed use of English and Spanish language throughout the book. It made the characters more realistic and three-dimensional to me. For some this might be a difficult book to read. First the subject matter isn't comfortable, but it is honest and it is real. Second, it might be a little difficult to get used to the use of Spanish expressions, although, as mentioned I found it enhances the experience. I highly recommend this book and would urge anyone to read it who thinks s/he understands and or has an opinion on immigration with Mexico.