![]() Boswell creates a vivid and disturbing picture of a society tested by the pressures of assimilation, in which the proud declaration that properties and businesses are exclusively ``American owned'' makes it painfully clear to the malcontent Rudy that ``most of the world operated at a distance and in a language he did not know.'' The novel is generously, if a trifle mechanically, plotted and noteworthy for the compassion and insight that Boswell extends to virtually all his characters. ![]() Apura houses more desperate and dangerous people, such as 19-year-old Rudy Salazar, a powder keg whose anger and resentment over his culture's second-class status will flame out and touch the Schaefers-and also the family of Enrique ``Henry'' Calzado, who've moved ``up'' to Persimmon. ![]() ![]() The town of Persimmon, which lies just across the Rio Grande from the Mexican-American colonia of Apura, is inhabited by such harmlessly distracted souls as 30ish Gay Schaefer and her adolescent daughter Rita Gay's cousin Heart, a remote woman who's a recovering cancer patient and Denny Redmon, the high-school basketball coach Gay dallies with-and strings along-while living apart from the husband whom she's never divorced and with whom she has frequently reunited. An ambitious, absorbing saga of family and community relations, set in present-day New Mexico, from the author of the well-received Mystery Ride (1993), etc. ![]()
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