Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility [Hardcover]

Patricia Santana (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 2002

It's April 1969, and fourteen-year-old Yolanda Sahagún can hardly wait to see her favorite brother, Chuy, newly returned from Vietnam. But when he arrives at the Welcome Home party the family has prepared in his honor it's clear that the war has changed him. The transformation of Chuy is only one of the challenges that Yolanda and the rest of her family face. This powerful coming-of-age novel, winner of the 1999 Chicano/Latino Literary Contest, is a touching and funny account of a summer that is still remembered as a crossroads in American life. Yolanda and her brothers and sisters learn how to be men and women and how to be Americans as well as Mexican Americans.

"A captivating portrayal . . . .the novel is challenging, warm, provocative, often humorous, always engaging."--Rudolfo Anaya

"Patricia Santana's Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquillity will take you on an exhilarating journey through the tortured landscape of the late 1960s, and show you how the stench of a brutal foreign war and revolutionary winds at home swept into the lives on one Mexican American family in Southern California. . . . Santana takes her place among those new Chicana writers who are refashioning the face of American literature for the twenty-first century."--Jorge Mariscal, University of California, San Diego, author of Aztlan and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Seasoned with salty dashes of Spanish and radiant with family warmth and affection, Santana's 1999 Chicano/Latino Literary Contest-winning first novel tells the tender coming-of-age tale of a young Chicana in 1969 San Diego. Fourteen-year-old Yolanda "Yoli" Sahag£n, the seventh of nine children, is overjoyed to be planning the coming-home celebration for her favorite brother, Chuy, a soldier returning from the Vietnam War. But when he arrives, he is distant, despondent and violent, clearly not the same man who was drafted years before. Early the next morning, he inexplicably leaves town on his prized motorcycle for points unknown. This development disappoints and worries Yolanda, who is meanwhile battling adolescent troubles of her own: bad skin, sprouting breasts and budding love for popular, timid schoolmate Francisco. When Chuy eventually returns home once again, he remains distant, disrespectful and even cruel, hurling anti-Mexican slurs at friends and family. His much-foreshadowed emotional meltdown occurs when a traditional night game of hide-and-seek goes heinously awry, forcing him to evade police prosecution and go into hiding. The author injects a surprising amount of humor into this often sobering tale, mostly through her account of Yoli's escapades as she tries to stay afloat on the turbulent waters of puberty. Wonderfully realistic dialogue, Yoli's candid first-person narration and a feel-good conclusion replete with wedding bells round out this remarkably touching story about the ramifications of war on a shatterproof Mexican family. (Feb.)Forecast: Santana has her finger on the pulse of Mexican-American life in Southern California, and local sales should be strong. A few reviews in major publications would go a long way toward getting the book into readers' hands in other parts of the country.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

A Mexican American version of Born on the Fourth of July, Santana's first novel is a charming coming-of-age story set in San Diego in 1969. The Sahagun family throws a party for their son Chuy, who has just returned home from Vietnam, and Yolanda, anxious to see her favorite brother again, is saddened and frightened when it becomes clear that the war has had a lasting effect on him. Chuy soon disappears on a motorcycle for several months only to return with long hair, a beard, and an empty look in his eyes that worries both family and neighbors. He is seen howling late at night and hanging around the local high school, and soon he becomes the center of gossip in the community. After a run-in with the police, Chuy goes into hiding, and Yolanda, who experiences emotional changes of her own as she becomes a young woman, hopes to find him before he or anyone else gets hurt. Santana has crafted a fresh look at post-Vietnam family life. Carlos Orellana
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 276 pages
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press (February 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826324355
• ISBN-13: 978-0826324351
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,247,418 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Great First Novel, Buy it!, May 18, 2011

By 

James C. Jupp (Georgia Southern Univeristy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility (Paperback)

Breaking from "transparent prose" dominant in university and journalistic writing, Patricia Santana's Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility breathes life into fragments, self-indulgence, long and unwieldy sentences, and ironic thematics that serve raise questions rather than answer them.

Most invigorating about Motorcycle... is the adaptation of fragments intertwined into a web of meaning rather than transparent linear prose. Santana, whose teenage narrator Yoli is always scribbling furiously in a diary, writes a novel that reads like a grown-up diary from her adolescent memories. Yoli's novel/diary about a diary adds an ironic edginess to growing up in the sixties, suffering through the pressures of correct behavior in a Mexican-American family, enduring the psychological breakdown of her favorite brother Chuy who came back from Vietnam permanently damaged, and questioning traditional answers from parents as well as ideological answers such as chicanísmo and feminism prevalent at the time.

Yoli's big sister, Carolina, who sermonizes about Chicano politics and feminism, apes the feminist voice of early 90s Chicana writers that slightly misses the mark with working-class Mexican immigrants and Mexican American women they hope to reach but sounds great to the university-educated and upwardly mobile. Unlike her sister Carolina who preaches ideological answers, Yoli focuses on asking questions: Are we Mexicans or Americans? What should we reject about being a women in a man's world? What roles are available women in a Mexican-American family?

There is no motorcycle ride or any tranquility for Yoli in the novel/diary, only her hope to ride with her psychotic Vietnam Vet brother whose smiling thorazine stupor can't be made right by religion or ideology--both of which are incomplete. Edgy and interesting.
Great first novel--buy it!

James C. Jupp
Georgia Southern University

4.0 out of 5 stars Reviews by Livin' la vida Latina, January 27, 2011

By 

Livin' la vida Latina (U.S.A) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility (Paperback)

Reviewed by: Sandra Lopez, author of "Esperanza" and "Beyond the Gardens"
Member of Livin' la vida Latina
[...]

Review: Chuy is back from war, but he is different; and the whole family is wondering why, especially his "favorite" sister, Yolanda. So, right away, we are presented with a mystery. Who is this guy and what happened to him? Then Chuy runs off on his Harley and disappears. It is at this time that Yolanda and the family reminisce about Chuy and how it used to be with their family. And while Chuy is "missing," Yolanda continues to grow into her teen years, oblivious to her own femininity and the male psyche. It's like "The (Latina) Wonder Years," a story of a youth coming of age as world history--war, TV, music, the 60's--happens all around her.

At times, the story went off track when the main character started telling the history of their roots and the "American" dream--all boring, really. And although this book was very well-written for the most part, you did run into some sentences that were quite ambiguous. Don't be fooled by the cover, which looks like something that was crudely spliced together in Photoshop; this book is actually pretty good. The author writes with such poignant sensitivity and beauty. Full of mystery and intriguing wonder.

5.0 out of 5 stars Child of the Sixties, March 5, 2007

By 

Art Lover "Sicilian" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility (Paperback)

Patricia Santana has struck a chord on so many levels. She went back into the 1960's where even as children we knew they were turbulent, yet exhilarating times. Her expression of adolescent curiosities, love and confusion are as prevalent today as they were during that time, making this a novel that most people will have a self-to-text connection with. Being the child of immigrants I easily related to the home she grew up in and the traditions of the world during that time.

The novel is a well crafted. It makes us look at the world through the eyes of truly plausible, interesting characters and gives us some insights of the devastating aftermath of the Vietnam War.