a novel, American Book Award Winner
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This work of feminist fiction focuses on a painter seeking to finish a painting and reconstruct her life.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
When, at thirty-four, teacher and painter Rosa decides to make changes in her life, she has to contend with those who do not agree or understand. Rosa's seventeen-year-old son Sean feels slighted; Sierra, Rosa's best friend, is threatened; and Rosa's second husband Julio, is angry at Rosa and himself. How can she do this to him, he demands. The intensity of the love and hate she feels for Julio confuses Rosa. When they are in sync, conversation flows and making love is a powerful pleasure, but more often their simmering anger erupts. So she buys the house revealed to her in her dreams and lives by herself for the first time. When she finds out she is pregnant and decides to have Julio's baby, alone, everyone is - again - full of questions and accusations. Staring at her paintings and her belly, she, too, wonders what she is doing. Rosa is far from perfect - she drinks lots of wine, loves to flirt, and falls into bed with Julio when she tells herself she won't. She also has a strong and curious spirit, listens to her dreams, and fondly remembers the grandmother who raised her. Rosa is aware of her own "powerful softness" and realizes that "it takes all the strength I've got to push down through my fear, and you never really know if you're going to make it." Still she bravely questions, without knowing the answers, the roles and values she is expected to follow. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out < --From <
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An imperfect woman trying to make sense of Life,
By
This review is from: The Ultraviolet Sky (Hardcover)
I found myself drawn to Rosa's conflicting emotions in this tangled web of feelings and relationships. At age 34, teacher and painter Rosa seems to be undergoing an identity crisis: who is she to herself, who is she when she's alone? Never really having been alone before, she buys a house and tries it out. Finding herself pregnant with her 2nd husband's baby, she determines to bear and raise it alone. In spite of her flaws and weaknesses (which only make her a more compelling protagonist), Rosa continues to bravely ask questions, knowing there might be no answers forthcoming, about the roles and values she is expected to live by.Provocative.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Powerful Read,
By Leslie Simon (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Ultraviolet Sky (Hardcover)
Picture a cave and, on the walls of the cave, paint, seeping through to the other side, a future unseen by most. Reading The Ultraviolet Sky is like taking a walk through such a cave, and the story that bleeds through to the other side is one of survival.Rosa, a painter, has determined that although she loves her husband Julio, she will not sacrifice herself to a destructive relationship with him. She cannot tolerate his jealousy. amd she will not allow the psychological wounds he inflicts on her to kill her spirit. She is a woman with a lot of spirit, and she knows that if that spirit is denied, she will kill the one who stifles it. Rather than kill Julio, she leaves him. A Chicana, Rosa struggles against the limits of social roles while she draws strength from the myths of her culture. Rosa also draws from the power of her own dreams nad sometimes from the stories of her grandmother to regain her hold on herself. As she pulls away from Julio and literally moves from the city to the mountains, she creates a space for herself, where all of her can live. This includes her painting, her intense sensuality, and her longing for a deep and secure sexuality. In refusing to give up her freedom, Rosa also loses her close friend Sierra who seems unwilling to understand the depths of Rosa's needs. Perhaps Sierra is afraid to recognize her own needs. Impatient with her friend's reluctance, Rosa is saddened by the knowledge that she will be more alone than she had anticipated in her journey. Like Lily Briscoe, Rosa struggles for her vision, but unlike Virginia Woolf's painter in To the Lighthouse, Rosa has her vision and her child. Villanueva offers the reader the opportunity to see how a woman can be both mother and artist, neither losing herself nor her life. This contemporary novel, by one of the best Latinas writing today, offers a thrilling response to Woolf's Briscoe and Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier as it gives its readers in times that beg for new ways of seeing a vision we can use to move forward in our own lives.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Her voice comes from a deep reserve of personal power...,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Ultraviolet Sky (Paperback)
To her first novel,Alma Luz Villanueva brings the poet's divination for image and inernal logic, expressed in a series of dream sequences that hauntingly conclude each section and alter the hard forms of reality like a watercolor wash applied last. It's a fitting metaphor for her painter protagonist, Rosa, who embodies the modern feminist Chicana woman's struggle for self-definition in the male-centered Mexican culture as well as in the larger patriarchal culture....Rosa must reject the terms of possession (surrender and exploitation) in order to sustain her hopes for the futue she gives her children to. The protagonist has in her mind a painting she cannot finish, a composition of balance and infinite harmonies. Villanueva's ultraviolet sky is overhead for all of us.
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