Homeland [Paperback]

CRIS MAZZA (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A versatile and probing novelist, Mazza is at her clarion best in this riveting improvisation on the lost world chronicled in her memoir, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian (2003). Ronnie works in the geriatric hospital in which her stroke-afflicted father lives, but Medicare patients such as he are being forced to leave, and she decides that now is the time to attend to some mysterious, unfinished business involving the remains of her brother and mother, whose shocking deaths have so cruelly oppressed her. But their odd quest is interrupted by a pack of violent suburban teens. Rescued by a handsome and enigmatic migrant worker advocate, Ronnie and her father follow his lead and seek shelter deep in the canyons. As they struggle to survive, their tragic past unfolds in vivid flashbacks, and Mazza's mythic and mesmerizing tale charts the cruel paradoxes inherent in migrant workers' lives. Vital in its intimacy with the earth and archetypal in its sorrows and redemption, Mazza's arresting novel harmonizes with tales by Susan Straight, Antonya Nelson, and newcomer Joseph Coulson. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Cris Mazza is writing at the peak of her power. Homeland is an exquisite engrossing new novel about redemption, self-sacrifice, and the search for fulfillment. Rich and powerful . . . with an expansive, awe-inspiring humanity. Homeland simply makes for riveting and fast paced reading. --Virgil Suárez

Cris Mazza is a super-realist. She captures in the family portrait, Homeland, what Chuck Close does in his gigantic paintings overly realized likenesses made from millions of abstract pixils. Mazza makes believable maps more detailed than the things they represent. --Michael Martone

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Red Hen Press (April 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888996714
• ISBN-13: 978-1888996715
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,797,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In the first decade of the 21st century, Cris Mazza's work as a novelist expanded as she has continued to consider psychological and emotional complexities of contemporary life, but began to do so with the contributing complication of place: How regions or localities that still have their own unique characteristics of landscape, society, and culture impact the human experiences (sexuality, family, authority, gender) that Mazza explores in fiction. Her 9th book in 2001, Girl Beside Him, inhabits rural Wyoming. Homeland, (2004) involves a woman and her elderly father grappling with a 30-year-old family tragedy while they also find themselves homeless, living in the canyons of suburban Southern California alongside migrant agricultural workers. Indigenous / Growing Up Californian (2003), Mazza's collection of personal essays, deals with place as it anchors memory and the reconstruction of experience. Waterbaby (2007) looks at how local 19th century legends still live and grow in a seacoast town in Maine. 2009's Trickle-Down Timeline married time and place, returning to Southern California in the Reagan era 80s. Mazza's forthcoming novel, Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls continues her unrelenting look at sexual anxiety, now expanding into the nearly unmapped world of outdoor sex slaves in Southern California, as a troubled woman trying to rescue one of them admits her horror has blended with envy.

In 1984 Cris Mazza's first novel (and 3rd book), How to Leave a Country, while still in manuscript won the PEN / Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. The judges included Studs Terkel and Grace Paley. Some of her other notable earlier titles include Disability and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? which was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

A native of Southern California, Cris Mazza grew up in San Diego County. Her BA and MA were completed at San Diego State University, then she crossed the country to finish an MFA in writing at Brooklyn College before returning to San Diego where she lived several years training and showing her dogs, completing her first 4 books, and teaching at various local colleges and universities, including UC San Diego, and was Writer in Residence at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN, then at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. Currently she is professor and director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cris Mazza at her best, June 13, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Homeland (Paperback)

It's heartening to read a prolific writer whose work grows richer with each new publication. Thankfully, Mazza's customarily unsentimental characterization remains ruthlessly present in Homeland, but this novel also provides the reader with new gifts.

Homeland's main character, Ronnie, evokes a reader's pathos. Her unwitting vulnerability and sexual naivete make her a rare figure among Mazza's sexually savvy main characters, rendering her psychological life even more mysterious than Mazza's usually complex protagonists. The story itself grapples brilliantly with themes of family legacy, filial obligation, and childhood guilt.

On another level, the narrative also raises important metafictional questions. The novel's principal mystery involves the interface of narrative, truth, and memory, which subtly interrogates the meaning of narrative itself. Ultimately, the reader is left to question the power of narrative and its capacity to shape one's psyche. When the plot's main mystery is revealed, the reader may even wonder whether someone can really exist whose life remains unwritten.

This is the rare novel. It offers both a feast of ideas and the immersing satisfaction of more "traditional" narrative elements. Mazza, however, is a terrifically talented writer whose fine work is anything but "traditional."

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Online review posted, February 19, 2005

By 

Editor, SFHR (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Homeland (Paperback)

For those interested, the San Francisco Humanities Review has published online a long scholarly review of Homeland by Harriet Rafter, who teaches courses in the California novel at San Francisco State University.
[...]