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Library Journal Review
This rich, embellished debut novel, which brings together Guatemalan and American culture, focuses on the murder of Flor, the head of an orphanage in Guatemala. When she was young, Flor had been sent to work as a maid for a family in Boston. There she befriended the family's only child, Roger Graetz. While trying to uncover the facts surrounding Flor's death, Roger recounts the elaborate events of his family life, giving us an engrossing and colorful picture of American and Guatemalan culture. Flor is an appealing character whom the author uses successfully to ignite our curiosity about Guatemalan culture and reflections on our own private lives. Recommended for all fiction collections.-- David A. Berona, Westbrook Coll. Lib., Portland, Me. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
Set mainly in Guatemala under military tyranny in the 1980s, this accomplished first novel introduces a talented writer with a distinctive voice and an assured prose style. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
CHOICE Review
Looking at the jacket illustration, the title, and even the name of the author, one might naturally expect this to turn out to be a piece of Latin American magic realism, especially as the setting is a fictionalized Guatemala that the writer assures us is impossible to grasp the horror of in a mere work of fiction. But though this work does employ the magic-realists' assumption that Latin American history defies the limits of credibility of ordinary fiction, it has been written in idiomatic English by a youngish editor at Harper's. This deliberately paced novel (some may even find it too long for its own good) discovers the obsession of a young American son of an upper-class Guatemalan mother with Flor, an impoverished Guatemalan sent to work in Roger's household, and then on to a Wellesley education and, eventually, to a violent end in her native country thanks to her involvement in its murderous politics (which have been supported or tolerated by America, of course). Roger seeks out Moya, a friend, in the attempt to do posthumous justice to Flor by "telling" her her own story. Some may find the call on their senses of Central American Spanish idiom difficult to cope with for instance, the sheer accumulation of instances of "vos" and "pues" but the final effect is of a detective story with an unhappy ending in the style of the early Fellini. A book difficult to categorize but possibly likely to attract a cult following. J. M. Ditsky; University of Windsor
Booklist Review
A Guatemalan American short-story writer and journalist, Goldman brings his intimate and unique ~understanding of these two very different cultures to his ambitious and circular first novel. His hero, Roger Graetz, is also of Guatemalan and American ~descent--his mother a proud, Catholic Guatemalan aristocrat, his father a feisty Massachusetts Jew. They live, tensely, in a Boston suburb with Flor de Mayo, an orphan sent as a maid by Roger's no-nonsense Guatemalan grandmother but taken in as a daughter by his kind father. Roger worships Flor with more than brotherly love but just less than the passion of a lover. Flor begins first grade at age 13 but accelerates rapidly, ultimately graduating from Wellesley. Surprising everyone, including herself, she returns to Guatemala at the height of the violence, corruption, and madness of the 1980s and becomes the director of an orphanage until she is inexplicably murdered. Shocked by her death and the attendant rumors that she was a baby seller, Roger and Moya, a long-estranged boyhood friend, short-term lover of Flor's, and journalist, join forces and attempt a circumspect investigation. They unearth more memories and dreams then facts, more recognition of the evil and perversity strangling Guatemala than insights into Flor's secrets. Goldman's complex and masterful tale loops and turns and doubles back on itself, revealing the transmutability of truth, the narcosis of obsession, the enigmas of culture, and the irrepressible drive to survive. ~--Donna Seaman
