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An exciting New Yorkerdebut fiction writer and new voice in Latina fiction brings us stories as beautiful as they are gritty, as haunting as they are immediate. From its dusty city streets lined with lottery stands and popsicle vendors to its humid and desolate beaches, Cristina Henríquez brings Panama vibrantly to life on the pages of her remarkable debut. Just as Junot Díaz created an intensely urban literary landscape from the barrios of the Dominican Republic and the immigrant communities of New Jersey, Henríquez now carves out a vision of contemporary Panama as seen through the eyes of those who call it home and those who, in making lives in the States, have become outsiders. Come Together, Fall Apartintroduces us to young people at emotional crossroads-a man in a remote beach town who can't decide whether to marry his girlfriend; a girl whose close relationship with her mother is strained by her feelings for her first boyfriend; an American girl who is staying with her grandparents in Panama while her parents divorce at home; a young woman who wants more from life than her boyfriend, job, and drug habit have to offer-and vividly captures the varied landscapes and shifting culture of a country in transition. These stories of family bonds and generational conflicts, youthful infatuation and genuine passion are tender, ambitious, and unflinching. They herald the arrival of a fresh, exciting, and lavishly talented new voice in American literature.
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Library Journal Review
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Henriquez offers a tender collection of short stories and a novella set in Panama around the time of the military leader Noriega's fall. The writing is pleasantly engaging but far from trite; throughout, the characters confront significant life issues like marriage, coming of age, independence, divorce, job tedium, drug addiction, and incest while struggling with political upheaval, generational conflict, and personal ambitions and desires. Through vividly evoked landscapes, neighborhoods, and families, Henriquez reveals the consequences of a mother's death ("Ashes"), a father's infidelity ("Come Together, Fall Apart"), or a couple's divorce ("Mercury"). The poignancy of many of these stories is intense, especially that of the title novella. Recommended for all collections.-Sofia A. Tangalos, SUNY at Buffalo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
The characters in this eloquent, muted debut collection of eight stories plus the title novella are eager to enjoy life, though thwarted by the inimical conditions of a Panama in transition after the collapse of Noriega's rule. The young couple in the first story, "Yanina," embody a sweetly turbulent and conflicted relationship: the title character, wounded by the marital infidelity of her father and later of her godfather, asks her well-meaning but still uncertain boyfriend, Ren?, to marry her 45 times. "Ashes," which first appeared in The New Yorker, tracks the unraveling effects of a mother's death on her daughter, Mireya, already adrift in troubled relationships and endangered by her arduous job as a meat cutter. Characters reel from family rupture and dysfunction: the teenaged Maria in "Mercury," for example, is torn between her home in New Jersey, where her parents are divorcing, and Panama City, where she is sent to visit aging grandparents she wants desperately to impress with her Spanish. The eponymous final novella, set in late 1989 on the eve of the American invasion of Panama, affectingly reveals a country "teetering on the edge of a cliff" through the fate of a family forced to leave their ancestral Panama City home. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In eight short stories and a novella, newcomer Henriuez creates a vision of Panama that is at once sweepingly realistic and subtly hallucinogenic. Water imagery abounds, and like water, these tales are transparent yet weighty, buoyant yet crushing. Henriquez evokes a scruffy landscape and a shabby Panama City where the heat is debilitating, life is precarious, and relationships are skewed. Fathers are absent, dangerous, or depressed. Young women scramble to hold on to crummy jobs and unreliable lovers. People have trouble expressing their feelings, and political unrest is driving everyone crazy. In the ravishing title novella, a family faces eviction while Noriega is under siege, and the country braces for an American invasion that promises to be both military and corporate. It is left to young boys and girls to try to hold their households together--literally, in one surreal tale. Losses great and small are common currency, and yet these fluid stories abound in beauty, irony, and magic. Like Junot Diaz and Daniel Alarcon, Henriquez is an immensely gifted young writer who evokes the spirit of a struggling land and the people who love it beyond reason. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
