Caramelo
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Caramelo: A Novel |
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| Author: | Sandra Cisneros |
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| Publisher: | Knopf |
Caramelo is a romantic tale of homelands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. Vivid, funny, intimate, historical, it is a brilliant work destined to become a classic: a major new novel from one of our country’s most beloved storytellers.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros’s first novel since her celebrated The House on Mango Street, weaves a large yet intricate pattern, much like the decorative fringe on a rebozo, the traditional Mexican shawl. Through the eyes of young Celaya, or Lala, the Reyes family saga twists and turns over three generations of truths, half-truths, and outright lies. And, like Celaya’s grandmother’s prized caramelo (striped) rebozo, so is “the universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven…. Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone.” The Reyes clan, from Awful Grandmother Soledad and her favorite son Inocencio to Celaya, follow their destinies from Mexico City to the U.S. armed forces, jobs upholstering furniture, and to Chicago and San Antonio. Celaya gathers and retells, in over 80 chapters, the stories that reinforce her family’s, and subsequently her own, identity as they travel between the U.S.-Mexican border and within the United States. Rich with sensory descriptions and animated conversations and peppered with Mexican cultural and historical details, this novel can hardly contain itself. Also an acclaimed poet, Cisneros writes fiercely and thoroughly, and her characters enter and exit the page with uncommon humanity. Although the book is long—over 400 pages plus a relevant U.S.-Mexico chronology—in many ways it’s not long enough. The world of the 20th-century Mexican family, and of the Reyeses in particular, is as complicated, timeless, and satisfying as our own family stories. —Emily Russin
Barnes and Noble
“This book,” Eduardo Galeano writes, “is a crowded train, a never-stop round-trip train going and coming back and going again between Mexico and the U.S.A., across the frontiers of land and time: full of voices, full of music, made from memory, making life.” Anyone who has ever read a Sandra Cisneros novel knows these large families, with their noisy gatherings, and their weekend feasts of renewal.
