THE SAVIOR OF 6TH STREET does not earn my praise

THE SAVIOR OF 6TH STREET
ORLANDO ORTEGA-MEDINA
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Urban Magical realism novel for fans of Haruki Murakami, Toni Morrison, and Junot Diaz

Deserted by his father at the age of four and raised by his voodoo queen mother on the fringes of Skid Row, Los Angeles street artist Virgilio Santos believes it his mission to save the down-and-outers in his neighborhood. But when he crosses paths with Beatrice Schein, an alluring Westside art collector with an aim to promote him to the international art world, Virgilio is tempted to turn his back on his friends. That is, until he discovers that Beatrice's father is a principal financier of organized crime in his neighborhood with plans to tear it all down for redevelopment.

'Rendered with urgent intensity, The Savior of 6th Street is a literary tour de force that confirms Orlando Ortega-Medina as one of the most original storytellers of our time.' (quote unattributed in the original)

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Need I belabor the "Virgilio/Virgil" and "Beatrice" call-backs to The Divine Comedy? There's really all you need to know in this book's defecnse. We're on A Quest, we will be meeting adversaries, we will not feel fully present in the narrative...unless the author puts it in the first person of course! So the author puts it in the first person.

The inclusion of a trans character in Concha gets this book a slot in the #PrideMonth blast. Also, the author's latesr book will be reviews in less than an hour. The fact is, I'm not a fan of this fantasy retelling of Divine Comedy. Santería, the magic system we get in this magical-realist novel, does as little for me as other variations on catholicsm do. Putting it in a first-person retelling of Dante's epically long, epically weird poen, only in prose, got an amused smile at the conceit. The execution doesn't match the ambition for me.

As rhetorical stand-ins for the forces of gentrification as expressions of the rancid neoliberal hellscape of 21st century LA, the author's villains are fine caricatures. The issue of writing an otherwise straightforward story of a talented, impoverished nobody finding his voice and getting the attention he merits as a modern take on a world literarure monadnock is the characters in the former need to be fleshed out. The characters need to command my sympathy and attention in immediate ways. In the latter, the characters are archetypes, are so removed from any need to know more than a liberal-arts course teaches you about them (relegated to the footnotes) that drawing deeper lines around them is akin to touching up Mona Lisa with some pink acrylic to make her skin look more "realistic".

A book equivalent of a pot of pink axrylic gets stars for ambition not achievement.