Customer Reviews

The Hummingbird's Daughter: A Novel

5 star:		(58)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read a lot of books. Some are just for fun, some are silly, some are educational, some are not very good. But, every now and then, I find one that is so special that I will read it again, and probably again a few more times.

You can read a "summary" of the book in other reviews, both publishers' and readers'. So, why did I like it and why should you read it.

First, the story is incredible. A child born in poverty begins to show amazing intelligence, skills...and grows to womanhood having had profound effect on her country of birth. Truth is indeed "stranger than fiction".

Second, the author has an amazing talent with words. He gives you the sights, sounds, smells of the world in which Teresita lived. He also uses words to bring each person to life. I actually called a friend to share a quote...Tomas Urrea to Lauro Aguirre...."Although it is true that you are insufferable and irritating, and rightly famed for your endless posturing and platudinous pontificating..." (don't worry, potential reader, though, the book is not full of big words, just, occasionally, one creeps in...I loved that quote because it reminded me of someone.)

Third, I was able to experience a time and place distant from me. Some of what happened was horrific, but, it happened. I was able to begin to understand.

Finally, I loved this book, and will read it again because it contains a message of love and hope that I can understand.

Books do many things, entertain, enlighten and sometimes enrich.

This book enriches, enlightens and entertains.

In Latin America, instead of saying "to give birth to", the people say "para dar a luz", to bring to the light. Luis Urrea has brought to the light his remarkable great-aunt, La Teresita, a curandera who came to be known as la Santa de Cabora. His painstaking research has resulted in what I can only term a biography written in the style of magical realism. (I've never been able to understand the difference between magic and realism in the first place.) This book is part cultural anthropology, part Mexican history, and wholly enchanting. Urrea is a powerful, masterly writer who sure knows his stuff. He brings his readers to the light of understanding, of feeling, of acknowledgement. I think he may have inherited some of his ancestor's talent for transformation.

Teresita Urrea was a real person. She is buried in a small town in eastern Arizona, where I spent some time growing up. I went to her graveside at age 17, looking only for cheap thrills. (We thought back then that the grave contained the body of a woman who had fought in the Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa, and whose ghost was rumored to haunt the cemetary.) I wanted to be scared. Instead, on that bitterly cold November night, I found the air around her grave to be soft and warm, and I could smell roses. No roses bloom in the Clifton cemetary in November. Instead of being frightened, I came away with what was then an inexplicable sense of peace. I didn't understand at the time, but now I do. Her healing ways still linger.

Luis Urrea has given us the spirit of La Teresa, warm, alive, and still wearing the scent of roses. I loved reading this book. You will too.

Not since I read Mario Vargas Llosa's THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD several years ago have I come across a novel whose characters, story, and general aura captivated me so completely that I was sorry to see it come to its inevitable end. Until I read THE HUMMINGBIRD'S DAUGHTER.

Luis Alberto Urrea proves himself to be a consummate storyteller, creating a cast of memorable characters whose intersecting lives blend the traditions of hacienda-owning, Christian Mexico with the pantheistic mysticism of Indian Mexico. Urrea depicts Mexico's ironic mixture of warmth and harshness through countless small touches and turns of phrase, creating a remarkably strong sense of place. In fact, Mexico itself becomes one of the book's major characters - its people, its history, its austere and unforgiving climate and geography. The end result is a novel that traces the evolution of Mexico in the late 1800's and the birth of the modern Mexican state in an America-dominated age. It is no coincidence that a book so deeply rooted in Mexico at its beginning ends a number of years later in a train headed for the United States.

The Hummingbird is Cayetana, a poor but strong-willed woman who gives birth to a daughter. Believing that the choice of name will dictate her child's future, Cayetana christens her daughter Nina Garcia Nona Maria Rebecca Chavez. The Hummingbird abandons her daughter at an early age, leaving her with her aunt and disappearing from sight. The young girl, unusually bright and inquisitive, is eventually given over to the tutelage of Huila, the estancia's resident midwife, medicine woman, and all-around mystical healer. As if to prove her absent mother correct even if her choice of names was wrong, the young girl rechristens herself as Theresa, after Saint Theresa. "I am going to be her," she explains to the dubious Huila.

Theresa's father, we soon discover, is Tomas Urrea, the rich landowner of the Sinaloan estate where they live. Teresita, as she is called, demonstrates mystical powers exceeding those of her teacher, to the point where she becomes widely known as a faith healer and ultimately a threat to a ruthless but inexplicably skittish government. Urrea's characters are beautifully drawn, from the saintly Teresita to the cranky but lovable Huila, from the liberal-thinking Tomas to his jewel- and tradition-encrusted wife Dona Loreto, from the radical but inventive engineer Don Lauro Aguirre to the scampish boy Buenaventura (another of Tomas's illegitimate children) and the honor-bound outlaw, Cruz Chavez.

While Urrea's prose is neither as dense nor as introspective as Garcia Marquez's or Cormac McCarthy's, his storytelling flows at a graceful pace that easily sustains the reader's interest. The writing is filled with small touches that evoke the sights and sounds and smells of rural Mexico: "Segundo shifted in the saddle, and it made its three hundred leather sounds." Then there are the cruel oddities of Mexico, such as the rural policemen who travel the countryside exhibiting the floating head of a captured bandit as a way to intimidate the peasants into obedience, or the Hummingbird's sister, Tia, whose smoking habit includes flicking the burnt ash on her tongue as though it was a naturally consumable part of the cigarette.

Best of all, however, are the stories and traditions Urrea integrates into the people's daily lives, such as the fabled visit of the Virgin Mary to Teresa's ancestors. Mary's heavenly descent ends with the Mother of God stuck on top of a huge cactus, from where she spoke. "What did she say?" Teresa asks. "Get me a ladder," Huila answers. And that's what the people did for the Mother of God. "This is how Heaven works," Huila explains. "They're practical. We are always looks for rays of light. For lightning bolts or burning bushes. But God is a worker, like us. He made the world - He didn't hire poor Indios to build it for him! God has worker's hands. Just remember - angels carry no harps. Angels carry hammers."

Readers who want to be immersed in a story, lose themselves in another place and time and culture, and allow the marvel of great fiction to transport them to a world both forever lost and beyond their own, will surely enjoy THE HUMMINGBIRD'S DAUGHTER. Like me, their only regret will probably be reaching the 495th and last page.

I can't begin to express my love for this book! I saw a brief review in the Denver papers and thought that I would give it a try. I had never read anything by Urrea before and knew nothing about him. It was such a delicious surprise to be able to read a fresh, crisp and truely 3 dimensional story. The characters are believeable, the "bad" ones and the heros. The descriptions are complete and so vivid that you can imagine that you are there. The Spanish words add flavor to the story and are either understood by context or explained. I read alot and I have to say that this is one of my top 5 favorite books of all time! Maybe just my favorite. If you want a real novel with believable characters then you will love this book.

"The Hummingbird's Daughter" by Luis Alberto Urrea is one of the best books I have ever read. Period. And I'm not even in Urrea's target demographic! Nonetheless, I absolutely loved it.

Without divulging too much of the plot, the story follows Teresita Urrea, a distant relative of the author's from the late 1800's, as she transforms from a poor indian in Mexico to a quasi-saint.

Urrea's writing is fantastic. He paints a great story and landscape of the old west. The pace is good, quick-moving, and never stalls. The character development is extraordinary; there are some truly unforgettable people in this tale.

Overall, in a word, this book is "magical". It is truly a great story. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Urrea is a virtuoso in the use of descriptive language. His story brings to life a rich tapestry of life in the Mexico of Porfirio Diaz. The book oscillates between the rational outlook of Tomas, patron of the estate on which the story is set and the world of magical realism which Teresita, his daughter and the protagonist of the novel, inhabits. Magical realism in Latin American literature can sometimes border on being inaccessible to readers of different cultures, but here it is essential to the storyline and effectively draws the reader into the world of the local people. Unfortunately, the characters in the book are decidedly flat. Despite the marvelous descriptions of the physical world in the novel, Urrea fails to portray the inner lives of his characters in a convincing way. This leads to key junctures in the plot becoming almost uninterpretable. We are left wondering what has motivated the sudden decision by the promiscuous Tomas, who has previously been completely heedless of the fate of the children he has fathered, to adopt one of them while rejecting another. The reader's surprise at this turn of events becomes astonishment when later in the book that same son who was rejected is suddenly given charge of the estate. Many of the events of the book take the reader by surprise because of a lack of character development. Nevertheless, the story is an enjoyable read, and a fascinating window into the world of 19th Century Mexico.

I picked this book on a whim, knowing absolutely nothing about the author. I opened the pages and became transfixed by the magic I found there. I couldn't put this book down. Urrea created a world filled with characters that mirrored my own latina background with such wit and sympathy that even pobre Tomas captured my heart, rake that he is. I was thrilled to find the author's notes about his take on an actual relative. The Mexican penchant for "polishing up" history is brilliantly put together here and I have found a new favorite author!

This is a phenomenal, picaresque story. Teresa (Teresita) Urrea, the Hummingbird's daughter, possessed me, made me want to dig my bare feet in the earth and rub rose petals and lavender all over my body. She is now my beloved hero of contemporary literature. Strong, courageous, formidable, guileless, beautifully vulnerable, compassionate, quick-witted, and luminescent, Teresa is a modern-day *saint* without the dismal, pious sobriety of one. She is more like a noble iconoclast. She hikes up her skirts and rides a horse better than any man, eats like a lumberjack, and engages in astral projection. She denounces organized religion and behaves more like a pantheist. She can heal with her hands, bandy words with politicians, and flirt with the infamous.

The author based this work of fiction on real events in the life of an eponymous blood relation, circa 1880 (when the story also takes pace). He spent 20 years in the research and writing, which is evident in the stirring, complex, yet easily digestible, mouth-watering narration of this novel.

Teresa is the illegitimate daughter of wealthy (and married) south-of-the-border rancher Don Tomas and a fourteen year-old peasant Indian woman who fled Sinaloa for greener pastures. Raised initially by her mean-spirited aunt, her adventurous spirit eventually delivers her to the house of her father at a tender, young age. The protective, flinty Huila, a medicine woman who works for Don Tomas, apprehends Teresa's destiny and mentors her in the art and botanical science of healing. Huila is also aware that Teresa has a native and inherited shamanic talent way beyond midwifery and organic medicine.

Filled with a sprawling and vivid cast of characters--vaqueros, caballeros, Indians, pilgrims,politicians, the wealthy as well as the indigent, apostates as well as the devout, this is a colorful, astutely comical allegory that is ripe with thought, action, and spirit. It is a story of familial love and redemption and the vastness of the soul. It is a tale of adventure that you won't want to end. (Rumor has it that a sequel and a film is in the works.)

Luis Alberto Urrea is an exuberant storyteller oozing an alchemical mixture of warmth, humor, satire, and vigorous vitality. His style is a reminiscent witch's brew of the best of outlaw and magical realism--The Milagro Beanfield War; Lonesome Dove; a dose of Garcia-Marquez; a glittering sprinkle of Isabelle Allende. But it is its own mystical and magical epic story of community and faith, of an unforgettable daughter and the people who loved her.

Like many of you out there, I'd become hard and jaded, thinking I would never find a book I could fall in love with the way I did when I was young and innocent, but when I saw a short review of this book in The New Yorker, something made me pay attention. I got the book, and it was love at first sentence. But I'd been down this road before. Sure, it seems sweet in the beginning, but then something happens. Often about halfway through, things begin to turn sour. You wonder: is it me? Am I too demanding? Am I being unrealistic? There's not a book out there that can satisfy a person from start to finish. Well, guess what? This one did. Thank you, Luis Alberto Urrea, for giving me a book to fall head-over-heels in love with. And, yes, get busy on that sequel! I want to know about Teresita's life in the USA.

I finished the book several days ago and am still trying to figure out what it meant to me, so it's hard to sum up in a review -- almost perhaps a better indication of something special than a rave review might be.

Well-written, interesting characters, good story: those are the conventional aspects. It was refreshing to read a book set in Central/Latin America that didn't seem to need to be magic realism, though I like that genre. What this book was is a good, real story with some magical elements, but presented in a way that's not off-putting -- as magic realism can be if not done by a master, of whom there are very few.

I'm not doing well with this review. I'll just stop and say I recommend this book strongly, and need to think about it some more. It's a real shame it's not more widely known -- it's so much better than a lot of the tripe that's been published this year.