...when I started reading Urrea's latest novel, my expectations were through the roof. And yet, somehow, he exceeded them ... The setup may sound like a tearjerker, but the book's spirit is irrepressibly high. Even in its saddest moments, The House of Broken Angels hums with joy ... The vulnerability on display in this novel is what makes it exceptional. It radiates from every character on the page, and from the author, who based Big Angel on his own brother Juan. And all that vulnerability, combined with humor and celebration and Urrea's vivid prose, will crack you open. At least while you're reading, this book will make you vulnerable, too.
Urrea’s affection for his characters is contagious, and the reader feels as though she’s been welcomed to the party ... In such a brimming, expansive novel, the most powerful image is the quietest: two adult brothers holding one another in bed, embarrassed and pleased.
...a big, messy, warmhearted epic, so overflowing with color and character its strands are sometimes hard to follow without keeping a homemade flowchart in the margins ... But Urrea’s Angels carries them all — good and ugly, broken and beautiful — without judgment, generous to the last breath.
...takes its rightful place alongside the best contemporary accounting of what it means to belong in this country of endless otherness ... Urrea writes in exhilarating but controlled slashes, wielding a machete that cuts like a scalpel. Every page comes alive with scent, taste and, perhaps most movingly, touch.
The way Urrea delivers it on the page is colorful, confusing and in urgent need of a family tree to help you keep the characters straight ... his narrative flirts with soap opera. And he doesn’t always have as firm a hand on his narrative as one might like...With so many characters in play, it also feels as if some get shortchanged ... Still, Urrea spins some wonderful phrases as he leads us through his throng of characters.
Entering a party after it has begun is disorienting. It is a testament to Urrea’s swift and lucid characterizations one does not want to leave this one ... From the love of marriages to the love of siblings, The House of Broken Angels shows how that the only reason people fight over stories is they want to connect, to be loved. They need to be loved. Some are starved for love. In a world that reduces human complexity to phrases like anchor baby or in-migration, a novel like The House of Broken Angels is a radical act. It is a big, epic story about how hard it is to love with all of your heart, and all of your family — regardless of which side of the border they live on. After all, as this novel keenly reminds us, all of us will one day wind up on the other side.
The vibe of the novel isn’t an elegy for the end of a clan that’s lost its sense of identity, but a tribute to a family that has acquired the freedom to make multiple identities for itself ... another strategy Urrea uses is to not stay in one place too long: The silly scenes give way to the richly comic ones, the sentimental ones to the moments of somber pathos. And he’s rightly confident that the mix of storytelling forms will cohere ... Urrea’s novel is a Mexican-American novel that’s a retort to what such a novel ought to be. For a novel about death, there’s a lot of life in it.
Be alert, be attentive, be appreciative. And there is much to appreciate in Urrea’s highly entertaining story of Big Angel, the de La Cruz family’s patriarch ... The quips and jokes come fast through a poignant novel that is very much about time itself, especially the passing of time and the inevitability of death ... Anger and sorrow are one pair of emotions that keeps surfacing throughout The House of Broken Angels. So do love and pain, joy and resentment, hatred and reconciliation, backstabbing and tenderness. All complicated, all compelling in Urrea’s powerful rendering of a Mexican-American family that is also an American family.
Luis Alberto Urrea’s The House of Broken Angels is a big, sprawling, messy, sexy, raucous house party of a book, a pan-generational family saga with an enormous, bounding heart, a poetic delivery and plenty of swagger ... the big ethnic gathering as plot engine is a fairly tired device — but Urrea’s embrace of it is so ardent, and his execution of it so energetic, that he blows right past any reservations about originality. The most technically impressive element of this spiraling group narrative is how the story rotates among the various family members, weaving their disparate voices, with effortless command, into a kind of Hispanic fugue of memory and desire ... The pace slackens noticeably as the book approaches its ending, a situation which is made worse by the introduction of an appallingly misplaced plot thread that nearly spoils the book’s denouement. And for all its flamboyance, Urrea’s novel has an uncertain relation to ethnic identity ... This dichotomy, which has manifested in Urrea’s fiction before, finds a paradoxical release in the novel’s full-throated enactment of a Latinx culture, one so exuberant that it begins after a while to feel . . . performative, perhaps even to the edge of caricature ... A flawed if ambitious and energetic book, one that troubles and questions and confronts, is more admirable than one that is highly polished but timid.
There’s deep heart and tenderness in this novel — especially between bullheaded Big Angel and his devoted constituents ... Despite all the mushy-gushy, The House of Broken Angels is at its most political, a border story. The de La Cruz clan lives in a working-class neighborhood in South San Diego, much like the neighborhood where Urrea spent his childhood. Some are legal immigrants from Tijuana. Some are undocumented, while the younger ones are 'Dreamers' ... The flashbacks detailing how each of them arrived in America — and what they had to give up and endure while here — are not only chillingly accurate, they’re heartbreaking (and infuriating) ... Sure, there are sections that drag a little. Yes, it’s tricky at first to keep track of the characters. (Tip: Create a character web; I did.) But like any extended family gathering, just roll with it, and you’ll do fine.
A man dying of cancer plans his own 74th birthday party. Then his mother dies and he has to hold her funeral on the same weekend. That might not seem like a setup for a warmly hilarious novel, but The House of Broken Angels is, delightfully, just that ... Although they’re set in different times and cultures, The House of Broken Angels reminded me often of Eudora Welty’s lovely debut novel, Delta Wedding. Set in 1923 at the Mississippi home of the enormous Fairchild family, Delta Wedding has the same tone of rollicking chaos, masterful storytelling and deep affection for its countless characters that Urrea’s novel has ... a rich array of poignant moments and funny ones ... There is darkness, too, as confessions are made, secrets revealed.
The House of Broken Angels hurtles forward with linguistic exuberance that can be gorgeous ('the moon was a curl of God’s fingernail') but also exhausting to keep up with. Urrea, who paints in neons rather than pastels, does not write for the emotionally faint of heart in need of personal space ... The House of Broken Angels soars on wings of memory and imagination into the 'imperfect and glorious, messy and hilarious' tragedy and comedy of family history.
It’s the sort of book you might read, as I did, in one long, breathless push, like diving into a pool and being loathe to surface ... Urrea’s book, rich in detail and images, has much to say about the immigrant experience; about how language becomes both a barrier and a bond; and how a family defines home. But it’s especially moving as an end-of-life portrait, as Big Angel tries to take in every detail of days that are slipping away.
...Luis Alberto Urrea has crafted a story that is teeming with family love, secrets, jealousies, alliances and surprises that make it burst with life on every page ... The House of Broken Angels can be a multigenerational, multinational dwelling anywhere. Get a copy for your house.
...a novel that is knowing and intimate, funny and tragic at once ... Even in death, Urrea shows, we never lose our connection to one another, which is the point of this deft and moving book.
