Ximena, chronically ill, spends hours in bed looking at picture books, thinking, dreaming. Her imagination stimulated by stories, she confuses fantasy with everyday existence. Forced to piece together snippets of information gleaned from her parents' conversations and her own observations, she forms a not-quite-coherent picture of life in the Andes. But her world begins to change and Ximena begins to awaken from the muddle of her fantasies and realities to her complexities and to society's prejudices.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Young Ximena, with an imagination that's a cross between a crone's and a crazy woman's, is the heroine of Laura Riesco's debut in English, "Ximena at the Crossroads," winner of a "Best Novel of the Year" award in Peru.
Though skinny and sickly, Ximena possesses great talent as a storyteller. Her stories are influenced predominantly by what her parents have read to her: fantasies and mythologies, until she begins to turn her gaze outside of her privileged world. There she learns that actions often carry two intentions--one for good and one for cruelty--such as when Ximena convinces her cousin Cintia to chop off the golden curls that Cintia's mother so carefully colors and combs. Though Ximena's advice results in her cousin's salvation, it also causes a split in the family and Ximena's unending guilt.
Ximena is interviewed by a woman who appears to be the girl's future self--a woman who knows how she hides from the harshest truths and who writes down the stories that only she knows. She forces Ximena to remember what she saw in a forbidden trip that she made to an Indian work camp just as her family prepared to flee to Lima and what a young man named Pablo told her of freedom and revolution. Ximena learns that existence is a series of crossroads--between childhood and adulthood, wealth and poverty, imperialism and socialism, and her own goodness and cruelty--and that choosing a path doesn't free a person from the burden of the other possibilities.
From Publishers Weekly
Selected as 1994's Best Novel of the Year in Peru, Riesco's North American debut is an intimate, beautifully wrought story of a young girl whose growing consciousness of social injustice during the 1940s coincides with the discovery of her own storytelling powers. The frail only child of wealthy parents, Ximena continually seeks to get beyond the parameters of her narrow existence by reading books. She devours every story she comes across?Indian legends, movie romances, biblical and classical myths?and spies on the grown-ups around her until a strike by Indian workers results in violence, after which Ximena's curiosity leads her into the midst of the revolt. Riesco's prose is luminous, and her rendering of a child's sensibility is remarkably authentic. Ximena is more confused than wise, alternately generous and spoiled, sensitive and cruel. The narrative is rich with the vivid, varied landscape and lore of a country in flux, but its greatest triumph is Ximena herself.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A highly readable, lovely story!,
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This review is from: Ximena at the Crossroad (Secret Weavers Series) (Paperback)
Ximena is the young daughter of a wealthy couple living on an hacienda in the highlands of the Andean mountains of Peru. Her parents shelter her and pamper her, providing her with education, a safe home, and loving care. She seeks knowledge of anything outside the realm of what her parents allow, often resorting to pictures, conversations, observations, and stepping outside of the physical boundaries imposed upon her by her parents.XIMENA AT THE CROSSROADS succeeds at so many levels. The chapters work as a developing novel or simply as short stories. Each is beautiful in its own right. There is variation in tense and person as the novel progesses. At one point, with the use of second person, the reader is taken into the novel itself and becomes Ximena! The story reveals how differences among people affect one child. There is a sense of the uneven way in which a child learns about the world through observation, pictures, stories, and conversations--often fusing fact with fantasy--and how fragmented the input is, always colored or filtered by what adults keep secret from a child. The message of social injustice becomes clearer toward the end of the novel as Ximena becomes directly involved in a dangerous situation. For a colorful and lush novel about a child's learning about her world, this is a novel not to be missed.
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