But, Lala learns, the ability to write your own history also means you must take special care in choosing your fate. Cisneros combines a real respect for history with a playful sense of how lies often tell the greatest truths-the characters, narrator, and author all play fast and loose with the facts. By book’s end, the different threads of these three lives are snugged into a tight knot. Still, the focus is on Lala, her papa, and the Awful Grandmother, the last a truly wonderful literary creation-a despotic matriarch guaranteed to frighten young and old but whose wounds, once revealed, are a revelation. The book’s title refers to an unfinished, candy-colored rebozo (shawl) that comes to symbolize both the interconnectedness of all these individual histories and the author’s act of weaving them together. Generous digressions trace roots and branches on the luxuriant family tree, telling the tales of ancestors, family members, and sometimes even walk-on players. When Celaya (or “Lala”) Reyes takes a family vacation from Chicago to Mexico City, she begins a journey from girl to young adult and from the present to the past. The author’s long-awaited second novel (following The House on Mango Street, 1984) is a sweeping, fictionalized history of her Mexican American family.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |