THE DEPOPULATION, interesting fictional treatment of factual event

THE DEPOPULATION
MARINA CLOSS (tr. Thomas Bunstead)
Bellevue Literary Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From a major new talent in Latin American literature comes a tale of cultures, languages, spirits, and the natural world on the brink of transformation

“Of all the happy, hermitic lands, the Guayrá was the jewel.”

So begins this polyphonic wonder of a novel set in a 17th-century Jesuit mission founded within the wild South American subtropics by the mystical and intense Father Ruiz and his assistant Father Maceta. As the priests seek to convert the indigenous Guaraní and unravel the many religious mysteries that surround them, the harmony of their community is abruptly upended by the arrival of Overá, who announces himself as the Son of God and younger brother of Jesus. But an even larger threat presents itself when word arrives that European marauders and slave hunters will soon descend upon the peaceful mission, compelling Overá and the priests to launch a mass exodus into the heart of the jungle.

Full of humor, passion, and terror, The Depopulation brilliantly evokes the moment when modernity’s spark set fire to a still-magic world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A story of two halves: in the beginning were words describing a vanished jungle world, evoking heat humidity and the stunning void of loss and emptiness...I was utterly drawn into this world, so much so that my summer shirt-changing schedule ramped up. So sweaty in sympathy was I that I couldn't read the story in bed for obvious reasons. The evocation of the world where the colonizers and the colonized agreed that god(s) speak to us and through some of us they choose left me rapt.

Comes the arrival of Overá and the languid, interesting story of these spiritual imperialists trying to fill a void...a void of hierarchy...turns slower, because the focus stops being on Ruiz and Maceta working to learn about and build over the world they've chosen to be in. This is also when the main body of colonizers, rapacious boring caricatures to a man, arrive to rape, pillage, and clap.

It's ironic that my favorite part was when the spiritual imperialists were center stage. Given my antipathy to the religion the men were foisting on already traumatized people, it does not make any sense to me that the secular depredations, more kinetic in their lineaments, should be the part where my attention flagged. The truth is, if the focus had shifted to the acts and actions of these horrifying greed-machines in action, I'd've put the book down never to be picked up again. Tale as old as time, beauty destroyed by beasts; I've read it, no need for more.

Author Closs titled the book accurately. The story of these white-savior priests leading the great unwashed (in the blood of The Lamb, repulsive image that is) native people away from the slavers and the greedy just...well, it felt try-hard. They're good for trying to use their knowledge of what the colonizers are up to as a means to protect their charges from it.

It's the "their charges" bit that sorta messes up my pleasure in the story. Overá (it feels like there's a Portuguese pun in that name, I'm sure of it, something like "truth-teller" or "honest guy" but it can't quite form in my mind because I don't know enough) and his delusions popped me out of the story because my frame of reference...I've known schizophrenic men, with delusions they're certain are THE Truth, so Overá is familiar to me. The flipside of familiarity in this case is lack of ability to see through the story's deistic-sovereignty lens. I see through my twenty-first century mental-illness lens the disordered thinking of a paranoid person's delusions.

So it really frustrated me not to continue to be swept away, yet that was what I experienced. The language Translator Bunstead used to present the ideas was lushly evocative. It seems likely to me that most others will not be so rigidly entrenched in psychotheraputic ideas as to be unable to set aside the twenty-first century long enough to immerse themselves in the sixteenth. It was a lovely visit for me, just a mite too short to last all story long.

While I was there, I had a lovely time. I hope you'll get into the depopulating Amazon and stay for the full ride.

SALT BONES, Demeter & Persephone on the Mexicali border

SALT BONES
JENNIFER GIVHAN
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Ramona Emerson’s Shutter: a gripping retelling of Persephone and Demeter in the Mexicali borderlands

At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting. . .

Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life. She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it's too late.

Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.

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

My Review: There's Spanish in here.

Everybody still here, this is a retelling of Demeter and Persephone, probably the original mother-myth in Western culture. It is also notable that Demeter's the oldest sister of baby Zeus...that energy surrounding maleness surrounds this entire story.

Are the whiny man-babys gone yet? Good.

The gynergy is strong in this one, folks. All the horror, and there's a lot of it, stems from problems and issues around femaleness in our highly misogynistic culture. Women are, for a wonder, presented as misogynistic as hell in here, and all the monstrous, horrifying behavior is portrayed as affecting women. (Why the fathers aren't ever fussed I'll leave to your imagination.)

Invest in the first quarter to third of the read as your acclimatization, get used to Mal and her pueblo's speech patterns, and (ebook users only) try out the built-in translation feature to get the hang of Spanglish, then cruise through the story that fills in the lines of the old myth in a really fun...not the right word, but "interesting" is so juiceless and "involving so cerebral...unexpected way.

It's a dark reality that Mal's fears and worries are rooted in the ugliness that is femicide, a too-easily-dismissed issue plaguing la frontera. Stories like this one are ways to increase awareness of the precarity of simply existing as a female, or in a female body, in so many parts of the world. And like the real world, some people have privilege, even when bad things happen to and around them. Seeing the author present this as a reality, well...brava for doing it at all, and do it more, please.

The Salton Sea is important enough to the read that I recommend you acquire basic knowledge of it, its existence and origin, before embarking on this fascinating thriller. I found the pace fast. I don't think everyone will. I hope you'll try, though.

THE LATINA ANTI-DIET: A Dietitian's Guide to Authentic Health that Celebrates Culture and Full-Flavor Living, good, supportive guide to eating

THE LATINA ANTI-DIET: A Dietitian's Guide to Authentic Health that Celebrates Culture and Full-Flavor Living
DALINA SOTO
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Break away from diet culture while still honoring your body and incorporating cultural foods in this fresh, expansive guide from the registered dietitian and creator of Your Latina Nutritionist.

Diet culture is facing a reckoning, and intuitive eating has been leading the charge. The movement has taken the internet by storm, encouraging us to stop dieting and make food choices that feel good for our bodies rather than follow influencers and their shakes.

But intuitive eating is missing a key ingredient: culture. Like many movements, intuitive eating has become co-opted by a select few—placing the focus on “mainstream” food while discounting cultural cuisines. But how can we gain a healthy attitude towards food when our foods—our arroz, habichuelas, and plátanos—are left out of the conversation?

Dalina Soto is here to add them back to our plates.

As a registered dietitian, Soto understands the pros and cons of intuitive eating. As a first-generation Dominican American, she’s also seen firsthand how this movement has only catered to a certain demographic. With her easy-to-follow CHULA method, Soto teaches us how to:

Challenge negative thoughts

Honor our bodies and health

Understand our needs

Listen to our hunger

Acknowledge our emotions

She gives us tools to confront diet culture and the whitewashing of food so we can go back to eating what we love while managing our health.

Engaging and incisive, The Latina Anti-Diet is for everyone who’s been told to lay off the tortillas and swap their white rice for brown. Soto shows us that food is so much more than calories; it’s about celebrating our culture and living a life full of flavor.

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

My Review: Food, fat, and flavor start with the same letter for a reason. I'm deeply anti-diet. This book crystalizes my objections to the diet industry's be-afraid-of-your-food message, its relentless focus on women and the concomitant relentless bombardment of negativity about appearance, or more stealthily but with the same objective, relentless "health" messaging that is anything but healthy.

The author is a social-media Force. She's got followers in droves...legions...and she's been giving this very practical method to get yourself into a healthy, sustainable pattern of eating the food you enjoy for a while now. I hadn't heard of her because I'm not all that interested in diets except to belittle and insult the anti-food goblins that perpetrate and perpetuate the anti-food messaging that damages so many people.

What else can I say? If you think you need a diet book, you really need this book. Skip the "one weird trick" fads, spend your time and your treasure here. Author Soto is Cicero to the Br'er Rabbits that abound in this space. She spends a deal of her page-count telling stories about those who've used her method...CHULA, explained above...to mend their fractured relationship to food. There's a lot of informative and explanatory text, so it's not just a paper version of an infomercial; the aim was to recreate her social-media presence's warm, approachable presentation of self. I found it effective, and agreeable, where I expected to feel it was kinda cringe.

*I*, a certifiable curmudgeon with a long-standing hatred of the dietmongers, am rating this book 5 stars and recommending it to people who think they need to diet. Push a pin in that idea until you've read this book.

THROUGH FENCES, graphic novel in the Latinographix series via Mad Creek Books

THROUGH FENCES (Latinographix series)
FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA (illus. Oscar Garza)
Mad Creek Books
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Through Fences follows the ups and downs of Latino kids and young adults in the US–Mexico borderlands:

San Ysidro, Calexico, McAllen, and back and forth across the border. A young girl’s journey north goes wrong, and now she is in a forbidding new place, away from her parents and brother, where she doesn’t understand what the adults in green are saying even as she tries to obey their rules.

Rocky, one of the few white kids in town, stands by and watches as Miguel is jumped by two of his friends. Maggie and her parents are separated at the border in a tragic accident.

Alberto’s son doesn’t understand his Mexican father’s hatred for “illegals” or his work as a border patrol agent. Alicia is a TikTok influencer who doesn’t want to grow up to be a hospital cleaning lady like her mother, but COVID complicates things. Whatever their challenges, the kids, teens, tweens, and adults in these pages are just trying to survive their everyday lives.

Vibrantly illustrated by Oscar Garza, each of these short stories brings a different perspective on the perils of living on the border while brown.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The stories told here are tough. They're honest, they're emotionally charged, and they do not pander to or play out for the gaze of oh-so-sensitive/delicate fleur wypipo who whine every time anyone tells them the unvarnished truth about what the system their privilege enables them to ignore actually does in their collective name and to their collective benefit.

I don't recommend this for under-fifteens. I do think it's a good idea to give the book to your comic-loving teen nibling/grand boy.

These are indicative of the visual idiom of the entire book. It's intense and kinetic art, it's intense storytelling, and it can't be lightly glossed over or cynically dismissed easily. Young white men in particular could use a dose of this reality. Apart from urging you to get the work in front of all the teenaged white lads you can find, I'm out of polite words to say.

CANTO CONTIGO, music-world YA with trans rep...brush up on your Spanish at the same time

CANTO CONTIGO
JONNY GARZA VILLA
Wednesday Books
$20.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: When a Mariachi star transfers schools, he expects to be handed his new group's lead vocalist spot—what he gets instead is a tenacious current lead with a very familiar, very kissable face.

In a twenty-four-hour span, Rafael Alvarez led North Amistad High School’s Mariachi Alma de la Frontera to their eleventh consecutive first-place win in the Mariachi Extravaganza de Nacional; and met, made out with, and almost hooked up with one of the cutest guys he’s ever met.

Now eight months later, Rafie’s ready for one final win. What he didn’t plan for is his family moving to San Antonio before his senior year, forcing him to leave behind his group while dealing with the loss of the most important person in his life—his beloved abuelo. Another hitch in his plan: The Selena Quintanilla-Perez Academy’s Mariachi Todos Colores already has a lead vocalist, Rey Chavez—the boy Rafie made out with—who now stands between him winning and being the great Mariachi Rafie's abuelo always believed him to be. Despite their newfound rivalry for center stage, Rafie can’t squash his feelings for Rey. Now he must decide between the people he’s known his entire life or the one just starting to get to know the real him.

Canto Contigo is a love letter to Mexican culture, family and legacy, the people who shape us, and allowing ourselves to forge our own path. At its heart, this is one of the most glorious rivals-to-lovers romance about finding the one who challenges you in the most extraordinary ways.

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

My Review: People are complicated, messy creatures, amalgamated from every speck of the spectrum of existence. No one who thinks babyqueers, that is your adolescent persons of all genders and preferences, should be kept in the dark about this, has any moral authority. They're arguing for repressions that they screech loudly about perceiving against them, but it being okay to do to others because they're Other.

The centrality of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is obviously lost on these idiots.

Now that's out of the way, Canto Contigo (that title rips my sentimental heart out) is the 180° opposite of the book-banner/oppressor mentality's comfort zone. There's an out trans person in a gay relationship! That ought to send some fur flying among the deeply homophobic Latine folks, the religious nuts, and the fascist identity police. Good job, Author Garza Villa. Keep swingin' for their kneecaps. That goes also for Rafie's overweening Man-itude. The sheer arrogance of all adolescents I have ever met too often gets left out of the mirror of YA fiction. There is not a male person alive in the world today who could not benefit from seeing how his Man-itude looks from the outside. Start early instilling awareness and perspective in your boys, gay or otherwise. It will help him, and all who love him, in the long run.

The grieving that Rafie does for his Abuelo is very well-handled, and makes Rafie's dickheadedness a lot more forgiveable. It's a big refreshing change to see boys being credited with the ability to process deep emotions, albeit not smoothly. Too often the resolution of the grieving is both too smooth and too fast. Rafie's grieving isn't complete by the end of the story but it's underway...much more honest, IMO. I'll alsi let Anglophone readers know that there's a goodly amount of Spanish used in the dialogue. As that's normal for Mexican-American boys, I didn't actually notice it much until I was asked to translate something. So, be aware if speaking Spanish is not on your list of accomplishments.

The vibrancy of these boys rushing into their lives, hurtling past the idiocy of phobes and their control fetishes, their smallness of spirit, and the rules they insist must be obeyed, was delightful. The music lessons are fascinating. The fact that the boys are rivals for a very important and prestigious position in their school's mariachi contest is a great way to keep the emotional loud pedal down without it feeling as though the author's manufacturing crises. It's baked in when the situation is set up this way. Going for the same role in a public-facing event is going to make competitors out of any two boys, then add to the mix that Rey's got the added pressure of representing for all of transmasc-dom.... They're believably entwined, they're completely besotted, and they each want to win.

Great way to tell a story. It's told well. I'm glad I got to know the entire bunch. Yes, even the jerks...need jerks to make a love story about us-v-them really work. This one's got that covered. I might think twice about handing the book to anyone fourteen or under without really carefully considering where that kid's social development was. Fifteen on up I'd be completely comfortable handing it over.

Get one for yourself, too, grandparent, and have a book club.