Customer Reviews

Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility

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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

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.

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.

Unfortunately, I am not the Francisco that Yoli, the young heroine in Patricia Santana's beautiful first novel, falls in love with. But I wish I was. For long after having read this novel, I still find myself thinking of Yoli and imagining her giving me "the look". Isn't that the highest and most worthwhile achievement of a novel? That a Yoli or a Don Quixote become as real as hope, and in our moments of reflection, their words and actions echo our own internal beauty? Patricia, may you give us many more Yoli's and may your clear and strong writing, like a rippling, cool, mountain brook, continue to remind us of our source.

I'm a great fan of the "coming of age" story and of the first novel. "The Cider House Rules" by John Irving, being one of my favorite coming of age stories.

In Patracia Santana's "Motorcyle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility" we view the world from the eyes of a teenage Mexican American girl/woman whose brothers' recent return from Vietnam has turned her world upside down. Her brother, like so many Vietnam vets., has returned home possessed by demons.

While her brother struggles to right himself fourteen-year-old Yolanda "Yoli" Sahagun must not only learn to deal with her beloved brothers' gloom and doom mood but learn to deal with her own daunting and confusing experience. That of becoming a woman.

I hope the rest of America soon discovers, as I did, this rich, humorous, sad, and wonderful story. Author Santana obviously has her finger, and her heart, on the pulse of the Latino community. The dialoge is strong and Latino in this well written and well told story. For a glimps inside the life of a real Mexican Ameican family, read "Motorcyle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility." Cammy Diaz A @ L