PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksEscandón treats her readers to the Alvarados’ fabulous life, which is full of gourmet food, fashion, travel, and the trappings of bourgeois success ... Escandón continually emphasizes how family is everything to the Alvarados—a source of strength, power, consolation, and, yes, solace during this period where their hearts are breaking and the earth itself is in flames. In Escandón’s tale, Los Angeles’s wildfires, strange orange skies, and ashen air are a constant backdrop, and these corrosions express the ordeals endured by the clan ... The most interesting part of L.A. Weather is Escandón’s use of melodrama to engage our slide into the abyss ... Given L.A. Weather’s focus on the nearly obsessive consumerism of one wealthy Latinx family, some of the most devastating aspects of climate change are not addressed with specificity. The novel does not much look at the unequal racial effects of global warming, which causes low-income people of color to struggle with acute respiratory problems and is feared to deepen racial and class inequalities surrounding housing and food. L.A. Weather, instead, creates a kind of climate melodrama-morality tale within the atmosphere of a Latinx Melrose Place or Falcon Crest. This is not necessarily the worst strategy for a literature that seeks to awaken its readers to our current troubles ... Perhaps some readers feel better processing that information when it is conveyed on the wings of Escandón’s family opera rather than in the dry prose of the IPCC report, or even a book that deals straight on, and harshly, with the intersecting problems of environmental ruin and racial and class injustice ... That is Escandón’s achievement here, and I applaud it.
Pola Oloixarac, tr. Adam Morris
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... engaging and challenging ... Oloixarac jumps into this saturnine literary tradition and adds to it an eccentric, intersectional feminist despair ... the reader is alerted to the fact that Oloixarac is abandoning any ambition to deliver an easily agreeable protagonist, an interesting goal in an age where relatability is the coin of the literary realm — though if one happens to be Latinx and/or someone who has experienced an \'evident defect,\' they might find these flip accounts of their identity cringeworthy before the first chapter has ended. Nevertheless, press onward: even if the book will supply a yet richer hoard of insults, Oloixarac offers an illuminating critique of the business of literature .... The ending, and Oloixarac’s solution, is not entirely satisfactory ... What Oloixarac calls for is a heady counteroffensive against \'death,\' which I stand by: writing as a commitment to people and some version of love, without descending into pabulum or cliché. Though Oloixarac herself appears skeptical or even nihilistic about the possibility of a contemporary literary culture that practices the humanistic values it often preaches, particularly when it comes to women writers of color, it bears noting that such a world does exist — you just have to look for it ... Mona’s message is often difficult to discern amid the emotive blankness and mythical creatures, but it is there, and rich, and real. We need literature that is born of a practice of recognizing others, forged in the heat of personal and emotive risk, and wrought from intimate, collective, and passionate struggle. It may be that such vaunted goals are tricky to realize within the mega-publishing houses that arise today like Ragnar’s monster, but, thankfully, there are still folks out there who love both literature and the human beings who read and write it.
Shelly Oria
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn a society where only one out of four rapes are reported — often because victims understand that police are unlikely to believe the allegations of accusers who do not resemble the \'real rape victim” archetype — the book’s relentless archive of victims’ stories also functions as a series of alternative police reports, witness statements, prosecutorial complaints, convictions, and, in one case, executions ... Indelible in the Hippocampus shows us that memory is what most women retain of their rapes, assaults, and harassments. These recollections form the cornerstone of a legal proceeding that they must plead and contest in their imaginations in place of an official prosecution ... Together, the works assembled in Indelible in the Hippocampus offer us the complex products of the state’s neglect to deter and prosecute sexual violence ... The writers in Indelible prove that where the government (and patriarchy) sees only disorganized emotionality in a victim’s response, she may actually be engaged in a sophisticated psychological process that charges, prosecutes, deliberates, and even punishes her attacker. The tragedy is that she is all too often forced to do this by herself, and only within her own imagination, because our criminal justice system has failed her.
Valerie Martin
RaveThe Washington PostValerie Martin's compelling new novel about the antebellum South describes the lurid, slippery power of the slavemaster over the slave, and how that authority debases and deranges not only the captive men and women but also the master himself. Or rather, herself … Martin's book is a painful and elegant study of Manon's kind of power, the authority of the mighty over the deprived. Less than a jailer, more than a guardian, Manon exercises her control over Sarah in ways that are intimate and shocking, and have the horrifying familiarity of what happens between lovers, or mothers and daughters. Martin's consistent grace as a writer renders these episodes all the more disturbing … Some of the scenes in the novel are so astonishing they would not work if Martin did not have such a fine and sure touch.
