Solito, by Javier Zamora

It would take a hard heart not to fall in love with nine-year-old Javier Zamora, with his head full of superheroes, love, and deep concerns about bodily functions. How, for example, can he trust modern plumbing, instead of the outhouse behind his grandparents’ home in El Salvador? What will keep him from being flushed down the toilet and into the ocean?

At the beginning of this memoir, he has a seemingly comfortable life in the tiny village of La Herradura, with his grandparents, aunt, and cousin. But he misses his parents, who immigrated to the United States to escape the political violence and gangs of their home country. In his dreams, Javier flies like Superman and greets his parents in California at their front door. A superhero could then fly back home.

When Javier turns nine, Don Dago, the coyote who helped his mother successfully cross the Mexican border thinks he is old enough to make the harrowing journey to reunite with his parents. But he is not a superhero. He’s just a little boy.

Zamora, who was in his late 20s when he began writing the book, tells the story from the perspective of his nine-year-old self, with the naivete and confusion of a child who had to put his life in the hands of people he didn’t even know and embark on a trek that many others did not survive.

In April 1999, he sets out for what he and his family expect to be a two-week trip. Instead, it stretches to nine weeks, as things begin to go wrong immediately, with unexplained delays, new coyotes coming and going, and confusing route changes. His grandfather goes with him for the first two weeks of the trip, along with a group of others fleeing the country.

After his grandfather leaves, Javier has no way to contact his family in El Salvador or in California. For seven weeks, his parents and grandparents have no idea where he is, or if he is even alive.

He forms a family bond with a young mother, Patricia (also his mother’s name), her young daughter Carla, and Chino, a tattooed teenager escaping gang life. In the book’s dedication, he says he owes his life to them. In searing details, he shows this to be true.

Zamora is at heart a poet, and he brings us along on his journey with writing so clear and poignant we hear, smell, see, taste, and feel with him. The hot and smelly hotel rooms full of people who cannot leave or even open the windows, the delight of his first taco, the feel of water when he can finally wash the sand and sweat away in a shower, the glint of a gun aimed his way. 

He’s a shy bookish boy, self-conscious about his weight and nervous about everything from the size of his penis to the cleanliness of his underwear and his crush on Carla. That he has to go through this experience for his own safety is appalling. That he is judged for it is heartless. 

When Zamora was 18, he began to write poetry about his journey, at the suggestion of his therapist. He wrote from the perspective of a coyote in “Looking at a Coyote.” He shared his love for, but distrust of, his home country in “El Salvador,” the home that can never be home again. In “Citizenship,” he watches others who look like him but who can cross the border easily and wonders how they are different from him. In “Second Attempt Crossing” he writes about Chino, who was like a life-saving older brother on the journey, but whose fate is uncertain in the United States. The poems stand beautifully on their own but offer heartbreaking depth if read after finishing this memoir.

Zamora earned citizenship through an Employment-Based Extraordinary Ability visa (EB-1), sometimes called a genius visa, and then a green card because of his writing. And, though grateful, he says refugees should not have to be geniuses to come to the United States. They should be accepted just because they are humans.

The book’s cover is a work of art in itself—an outline of a downcast boy filled with an image of the Mexican desert. The title—Solito, which means solitary—is placed above the image in a sea of white. The austerity shows how alone this dear little boy felt. The book ends on a poetic note—showing us a hint of his reunion with his parents but leaving the details for our imaginations. Our group we had one recommendation—that Zamora write a second book about his life in this country, his fraught reunion with his parents, and the reality of living in a country that will never be home.

— Patricia Prijatel

The Waters, by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel The Waters begins with “Once upon a time . . .” So we know to expect larger than life characters, clashes of good and evil, and a happily-ever-after ending. Yet The Waters is also a rural noir story, which means, in the author’s own words, it’s going to be “muddy and bloody,” with muck rattlers and rape, with the moral ambiguity of Wild Will Zook. And disgruntled men with lots of guns.

The story carries many themes: our relationship to the land and animals, religion versus spirituality, the meaning of family, math and logic versus intuition, aging, motherhood, reproductive rights, modern medicine versus folk medicine. But what drives the narrative is the division in the community. The men of Whiteheart are angry and discontent with Hermine (aka Herself), the matriarch of M’sauga Island, where no men are allowed and women do what they please. These men are suffering with problematic feet, bad backs, dark moods, and love problems. And Herself isn’t coming through with the cures the way she used to.

The men are troubled, sure their glory days are over. Once Whiteheart claimed its name from the delicate white-hearted celery grown by the effort of the whole community working harmoniously together. Now the land is row cropped and most of it is owned by the Clay family whose men are shadowed by hemophilia. Wild Will Zook has been banished. Wives are talking back, kids are disappointments, and Reverend Roy keeps telling them that to be a man is to suffer. Because they feel so beat down, they start shooting at stuff (animals, trees, machinery, M’sauga Island, Herself). In a memorable scene, they fell a beautiful old willow tree in an orgy of chain sawing—all the time keeping up an annoying Greek-chorus like commentary (aka whining) about the state of their world.

The only relief they get is when Rose Thorn (Herself’s youngest daughter) returns home, usually in the Spring. Rose Thorn doesn’t do anything to make them feel better because she’s a lazy woman. Yet, inevitably, when she’s around she can somehow “spin straw into gold and make people more interested in what might happen next.”

We meet Rose Thorn for the first time when the men discover her walking down the road, bedraggled and bleeding, secretly carrying a frail newborn in her backpack. The effect on the men is instant. They become considerate and loving. Interested. Hopeful.

The newborn in the backpack is Donkey, a child of rape, who comes of age in the story. On the island, she sleeps with either her grandmother or mother, sharing their dreams. She loves the swamp and the two donkeys just across the bridge. She crawls on her belly to meet the big m’sauga snake who she believes to be her sister. She turns to math and logic to try to understand a confusing world.

She is curious about the men and boys of Whiteheart and often slips away to observe them from behind the faded curtains of the house Wild Will built for Herself. But most of all, Donkey so wants Titus (who loves Rose Thorn passionately) to be her dad.

Titus, heir to the biggest farm in Whiteheart, has great passion for Rose Thorn, but he also loves practical, competent, Catholic, fertile Lorena, who can cut a pie into five perfectly even pieces (a source of wonderment to Donkey).

The climactic scene in the story, where the division in the community is finally resolved, is when the Greek chorus guys help Rose Thorn deliver her baby—Rose Moon, Titus’s child. This scene is hectic, funny, slapstick and very tender. When Titus finally shows up to carry Rose Thorn across the bridge, he is about to be bitten by the big m’sauga when Donkey tries to intervene and the snake bites her. And Herself falls in the water, only to be saved by Two Inch Tony.

As everyone is finally on the way to the hospital in Whiteheart, Donkey reflects on their dilemma.

If the Zook women continued living mysterious lives separate from the town, the men would continue watching them like prey from Boneset and making up stories about them, good and bad, calling them witches and angels. Burning fires and pissing Rosie into the snow. Standish might not shoot at them again, but someone else would; there was no end of men with guns.

So they abandon the island. Rose Thorn seeks medical care for her breast cancer, and eventually the women, Donkey, and baby Rose Moon move into Wild Will’s house. They accept the delicacies he leaves at the door, but they do not invite him in. He has become a kind of good ghost. He realizes that taking care of Rose Thorn in her pregnancy has “finally made a woman out of him, which is to say it has made him a better man.”

Titus has his epiphany too, when, having trapped and planned to kill the m’sauga, he instead submits to it and listens to the voice of God, which is not a man’s voice, telling him to take care of his kids.

Campbell’s writing is so marvelously detailed and specific that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world of the waters. And because she uses an omniscient narrative voice, we can know everything about everybody—even what the crows think of all the human messing around down below.

Campbell invites us to roll our eyes, be creeped out, laugh, think about, but not judge, the world of the waters. And perhaps that’s the fairy dust sprinkled on Rose Thorn that lets her lift people’s spirits. She doesn’t judge them. Our group hadn’t read rural noir before, and it times it felt like a bit much, but that didn’t deter us from lively discussions.

— Sharelle Moranville

Democracy Awakening, by Heather Cox Richardson

I started writing this review of Democracy Awakening the day after the Presidential election, but I just couldn’t finish it. I was feeling too sad and the writing just made me sadder. So here I am, now almost two weeks post-election and I am better able to talk about this wonderful book.

Ms. Richardson divides her book into three sections: Undermining Democracy, The Authoritarian Experiment, and Reclaiming America. The first section gives us a comprehensive American history lesson, focusing on the words in the Declaration of Independence that she claims set the stage for the unfolding of our commitment to government by and for the people. “All men are created equal.”  Certainly an odd statement for 1776, when the only people who would be able to vote (and other marks of democracy) in this new land were white men who owned property. And yet, that statement has resonated throughout our history as we slowly but surely inched forward to expand the categories of people who fall within its reach. But the author also uses this section of the book to demonstrate that this “progress” toward ever-greater inclusion has been a jerky, back-and-forth movement, always interrupted by those of wealth and power who resisted giving decision-making ability to more and more people unlike themselves.

In the second section of the book, Ms. Richardson starts with Donald Trump’s 2016 election. She calls out the worldview of the Trump inner circle, in particular that of Steve Bannon. “Bannon and his allies escalated the long-standing anti-liberal rhetoric of Republican talk radio hosts into hard-right paternalism. Under Bannon’s direction, right-leaning Breitbart News Network had run articles attacking politically active women and Black Americans and yet could insist that Bannon was neither sexist nor racist because in their formulation, a return to a traditional society would be best for everyone…. This worldview struck a chord with disaffected white Americans who felt as if they had been left behind since the 1980s…. A worldview that put Christianity at the center was especially appealing to evangelicals.” Richardson goes further to examine the travel ban, Trump’s increasing closeness to Putin and Russia, the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the first impeachment and Trump’s increasing rewriting of American history. She quotes Trump as saying, “Our country didn’t grow great with them. It grew great with you and your thought process and your ideology.” And, of course, she covers the second impeachment and Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.

Richardson’s third section, Reclaiming America, reminds us, in the words the book’s jacket, “that it is up to us to reclaim the principles on which the nation was founded, principles that have been repeatedly championed by marginalized Americans. Their dedication to the promises embodied in our history has renewed our commitment to democracy in the past. And it is in their commitment where we will find the road map for the nation’s future.”

So here we are. We read this book before the election, as I mentioned earlier. Many of us were hopeful that this election would mark this renewed commitment to democracy that Richardson showcases in this book. But no!  So where do we find hope? I find hope going back to the first section of the book and remembering that our progress has always been two steps forward, one-and-a-half steps back. Maybe this step, which I and the people in our book club find a giant leap backward, is just the harbinger of our next progress. We can hope and pray.

–Jeanie Smith