Brando Skyhorse - The Madonnas of Echo Park

Jul 11 2010 1:00 pm
Jul 11 2010 2:00 pm

Brando SkyhorseWe slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours. Those who’d never been here before could at last see the Promised Land in the darkness; those who’d been deported and come back, only a shadow of that promise. Before the sun rises on this famished desert, stretching from the fiercest undertow in the Pacific to the steepest flint-tipped crest in the San Gabriel Mountains, the temperature drops to an icy chill, the border disappears, and in a finger snap of a blink of an eye, we are running, carried on the breath of a morning frost into hot kitchens to cook your food, waltzing across miles of tile floor to clean your houses, settling like dew on shaggy front lawns to cut your grass. We run into this American dream with a determination to shed everything we know and love that weights us down if we have any hope of survival. This is how we learn to navigate the terrain.

Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, THE MADONNAS OF ECHO PARK (Free Press, $23), recounts the lives of Mexican Americans living in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park, once a fashionable home for people in the movie business and now a working-class community. Through a series of shifting points of view, we meet Felicia, a cleaning lady, and her daughter Aurora. We meet Efren Mendoza, a bus driver, and his brother Manny former jefe of the street gang Locos and father to Juan who’s just enlisted in the Army. And there are others -- all of these people who make up a neighborhood, people we see every day, never imagining the richness of their lives, or knowing how they intersect.

The title comes from an incident that shaped the whole community, an act of violence, an accidental shooting, affecting some tangentially and affecting others deeply and crucially. This is a fine and beautiful novel by any standard, but as a first novel, it is astoundingly good. - Mark LaFramboise

This first novel describes a group of middle-class Mexican-Americans living and working in Los Angeles. When an act of senseless violence occurs, each person is affected differently. Skyhorse evokes the trauma and its aftermath with great power and compassion.

The Madonnas of Echo Park (Hardcover)

By Brando Skyhorse
$23.00
ISBN-13: 9781439170809
Availability: Not currently in the store – Usually ships in 1-5 days
Published: Free Press, 6/2010
Other Editions of this Title
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Street:
Politics and Prose
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5015 Connecticut Ave. NW
,
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District Of Columbia
Postal Code:
20008
Country:
United States
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