Amazon.com Review
Judith Ortiz Cofer's spirited multigenre collection includes poetry, myth, fiction, and essays from the viewpoint of young people coming of age in a troubling world. One of the major characters, Maria Elenita, follows her own curiosity and sense of adventure through awakening womanhood and the discovery of her sexual self. Her mother, according to Maria Elenita, decorated their home in "early Puerto Rican: a religious print in every room.... It came to be a symbol for me of our relationship in those days."
The matrilineal connection is revealed as both homeplace and battleground. The poem "Mamacita" describes mother as a prevailing presence who "hummed all day long / over the caboose kitchen" and "dragged her broom / across a lifetime of linoleum floors." On the other hand, in the essay "Vida," mother becomes controversy: "My mother started to complain about the little things Vida did, or did not do.... Mother was spreading her wings and getting ready to fight for exclusivity over her nest." The revolution depicted is part of the human condition, the rough change from child to adult, couched in the bright colors of the barrio. --Susan Swartwout
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Returning to the territory covered in An Island Like You and Silent Dancing, Cofer further heightens her descriptions of barrio life with a pervasive current of sensuality and rebellion in this volume of poems and stories about growing up during the turbulent 1960s. Most of the stories are described in hindsight by narrator Mary Ellen, who is also known as Maria Elenita (however, readers may have trouble keeping track of the various narrators in the early stories?which are all told through first-person narration but from differing ages and perspectives). Caught between Hispanic and American lifestyles, and eager to break free of traditional Hispanic values, Mary Ellen is strongly attracted to things that are alien to her parents. Readers will likely relate to Mary Ellen's struggle for independence, her idealism and her need for answers, themes that Cofer carries through the entire collection. In "The Meaning of El Amor," for example, the narrator sneaks into a nightclub where her recently deceased father, "the Puerto Rican Romeo," moonlighted to find out why love causes so much suffering. Cofer's lyrical descriptions of how music and the Vietnam War fired Mary Ellen's youthful passions are affecting: "When she was deep into a song, Janis [Joplin] became beautiful. Her voice, hoarse and choked with pain, went right through my skin, and I began to understand the meaning of soul, el duende, in American music." Readers in the suggested age range may miss the most rewarding aspects of Cofer's work, but for mature teenagers, there is wisdom aplenty in this radiant collection. Ages 11-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
