The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea

March 14, 2019

Host:  Pam M
Attendees:  Cheryl, Janna, Allison, Michelle, Susan, JJ

The House of Broken Angels

The House of Broken Angels is, in fact, a party. Also a funeral. When the novel 

opens, Big Angel de la Cruz, the patriarch of a sprawling Mexican-American 

family, is getting ready to bury his mother, and to die. 

(First sentence: "Big Angel was late to his own mother's funeral."  

He's in the late stages of terminal cancer, and so he gathers 

his relatives for a weekend-long doubleheader.  Saturday, funeral.  Sunday, his

last birthday party  .........    The House of Broken Angels overflows with the pleasure 

of family.   You wouldn't be wrong to take this book as a rebuttal to Tolstoy's happy-family dictum. 

I'm not saying the de la Cruz family is perfect. Its members struggle with addiction, 

exhaustion, alienation, frustrated ambition. One is married to a woman who might 

be a demon. One spends the whole funeral and most of the birthday party outside 

in his car, too stubborn and afraid to come inside. Everyone is grieving, Big Angel 

most of all, and yet this is not a novel about grief. It's a novel about how amazing it 

is to have been alive.   (March 7, 2018   NPR Book Review)

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This wasn't the most favorite book we've ever read, but seemed to be a book which,

 once we dissected it a little,  found there was more to appreciate, if not like about it.  

We learned that this novel was based on the author's true experience of his 

half-brother's death.  If nothing else, we were introduced to Luis Alberto Urrea, 

a Mexican-American poet, novelist and essayist who has more than a dozen 

published works and several literary awards.

We ultimately rated it about 3.2  stars ***

Next month's selection is Where the Crawdad Sings by Delia Owens.

The May book is  Maid by Stephanie Land 

This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel

February 7, 2019
Hostess:  Susan
Attendees:  Lori, Amy, Janna, Cheryl, Pam T, Allison, Michelle, Emily

  *KIRKUS REVIEW 9/2016*

A big, brave, messy modern family struggles with the challenges of raising a transgender child.

“This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what’s good and right and then to be able to make it happen. If…you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child’s entire future and happiness is at stake.” Claude Walsh-Adams is all of 3 years old when he announces what he wants to be when he grows up—a girl. It’s a particularly tricky case of “be careful what you wish for” for his doctor mom and novelist dad, already the parents of four boys when they roll the reproductive dice one last time. At home, barrettes and dresses are fine, but once he starts kindergarten as a boy, Claude becomes so miserable that, with the advice of a “multi-degree-social-working-therapist-magician,” his parents decide to let him become Poppy. “So, gender dysphoria,” says the bizarrely bouncy therapist. “Congratulations to you both! Mazel tov! How exciting!” The excitement takes a nasty turn when horrifying homophobic incidents convince Rosie that the family must leave Madison, Wisconsin, for the reputedly more enlightened Seattle, Washington. But rather than putting Seattle’s tolerance to the test, they keep Poppy’s identity a secret from even her closest friends, a decision that blows up in their faces when she hits puberty. Though well-plotted, well-researched, and unflaggingly interesting, the novel is cloying at times, with arch formulations, preachy pronouncements, and a running metafictional fairy tale. It’s worth putting up with the occasional too-much-ism for all the rest of what bright, brave author Frankel (Goodbye for Now, 2012) has to offer as the mother of a transgender second-grader in real life.

***Interview with Laurie Frankel on NPR (1/2017)***

This novel was inspired by the author's own experience as a mother of a transgender child.   As thought-provoking a domestic novel as we have seen this year. what she hopes readers will get out of her book:"I think it is a topic that scares people and I think that in part that's because they haven't met anyone — or they don't know that they've met anyone — who is impacted by these issues. There are a lot of transgender people and there are even more people who are gender nonconforming, and these little kids are just kids. They are the least scary people you can imagine.
So one of the things that I hope is that people who read this book will read it and forget about the transgender issues and just be in the embrace of this family and realize that this family is like all families: They love and they keep secrets from one another and they protect one another and they struggle with how to do that and they have these challenges. And it's hard, but it isn't scary and it isn't abnormal at all."

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The subject matter of this novel was uncharted territory for our book club.  It was our first time to read about anything having to do with transgender issues.   Lots of discussion on multiple related topics! As much as this story focused on one boy-girl,  the common plot was was very much about family, and the dynamics resulting from the transgender point..more clinically known as gender dysphoria.   All in attendance read the book,  (that may be a first for our humble little book club)  A book well liked, we gave it a 4.1 star rating! 

Next month March 7:   The House of Broken Angels,  by Luis Alberto Urrea

Hostess:  Pam M