Caramelo

Lala’s family is going on a road trip to Mexico to visit the Awful Grandmother Soledad and Little Grandfather Narciso.  Lala’s family lives in Chicago where her father works with his two brothers in an upholstery business and those brothers are coming on the trip with their families, too.  This is their usual summer trip, but nothing will be usual about this adventure – the family arguments spill over to include the washer woman and her daughter, and eventually result in family secrets being revealed to Lala and her brothers.

Caramelo from award winning author Sandra Cisneros is a beautiful story of Mexican heritage and culture, delivering historical facts and stunning imagery that brings these scenes to live.  Broken into three sections, the novel follows first Lala’s family on this trip, then Lala’s retelling of how Soledad and Narciso fell in love, and finally Lala’s coming of age.  Loosely based on Cisneros’ own family history, this book reads like a telenovela with family arguments, secrets, and flashbacks.

I give Caramelo 4 out of 5 stars.  I was impressed by the imagery and beautiful writing of this novel.  I also appreciated the historical facts included in the narrative like the Mexican Revolution, the immigration of many families from Mexico to the Midwest, and the men who chose enlistment over jail throughout the US during World War II.  However, I did have trouble following some of the storyline in the second and third sections because of the large cast of characters and similar stories discussed more than once.

With discussions of violence and sex, this book is best directed towards mature audiences over 16.  I could see this being a great book club pick given the trio of sections and wide variety of characters.  I would also recommend this book to readers looking for something in the historical fiction genre without something set so deeply in the overdone WWII European trope.  I learned a lot about the experience of Mexicans in the early 1900’s through this novel and found myself looking for additional details to give this story more context and connection with what I already knew about the events of the time.

I chose Caramelo in honor of Cinco de Mayo.  This “holiday” is less party and more a remembrance of the Battle of Puebla during the second French invasion into the country where the Mexican forces won an inspirational battle to protect the forts of Loreto and Guadalupe.  I was looking for a novel that explored Mexican history and heritage and this fit that bill perfectly.  I was also excited to discover the audiobook as read by the author.  I am not a student of the Spanish language and did find some of audiobook difficult to follow solely because the author included some lines in both Spanish and English throughout the book.  However, one of my favorite things is listening to an author read their own works – in this case, it gave such power and emotion to the difficult arguments throughout the story.  If you’re looking for a book to explore Mexican heritage, I hope you’ll enjoy this as much as I did!

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What I’m Reading

• Current print book: The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune
• Current audio book: The Red Barron, Charles River Editors
• Book I’m most looking forward to: Maame, Jessica George