Both Sides

April 15, 2020
These 15 sometimes-sad, sometimes-infuriating, but always-illuminating stories take place around the U.S.-Mexico border. Dichotomies abound, with life here vs. there often the least of them. Love and pain, hope and fear, and kindness and cruelty are border staples, and they feature vividly in stories that tell of children trying to get back to Mexico after their parents have been deported there, of a man whose last act of loyalty precedes his grisly suicide, and of a despairing cop who grieves a poor artist found dead in the desert. Some award-winning and best-selling authors will be a draw here: Pura Belpr� honoree David Bowles; Christopher David Rosales, winner of the International Latino Book Award; Bram Stoker-nominated Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason; and ALA Black Caucus Literary Award winner Sandra Jackson-Opoku. Other authors are worth discovering, too, notably J. Todd Scott, whose Waw Kiwulik portrays the bifurcated life of the O'odham, whose tribal lands straddle the border. This gratifying and sometimes wryly funny read stands on its own, but it's also worth recommending as an #ownvoices alternative to Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt (2020).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

February 24, 2020
Many of the 15 short stories in this mixed bag of an anthology are set in the recent past, while others take a step into a frightening dystopian future in which a powerful tyrant defies the law. One gem is Shannon Kirk’s “American Figurehead,” which shrewdly observes the slippery slide from resistance to “merciless eradication of the complicit.” Other standouts are Nicolás Obregón’s poignant “Colibrí,” in which Milagros Posada, the deputy sheriff of a county on the U.S. border with Mexico, has the task of determining the identity of a “young... Mexican-looking” boy, whose body is found in the desert; and Cynthia Pelayo’s “The Lament of the Vejigante,” which explores the casual racism faced by a Puerto Rican and her growing respect for her family’s strength and resilience. Magic realism casts its spell over David Bowles’s “El Sombrerón,” an evocative and disturbing tale of a teenage Guatemalan girl who escapes to the U.S. but is still pursued by a malevolent yet seductive creature. In this timely volume, readers will find rage as well as hope and, occasionally, a dash of spirit-lifting poetry.