Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The rare immigrant chronicle that is as long on hope as it is on heartbreak.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Attention, TV and movie people: This story is made for the screen. This provides interesting new perspectives, but it is a little awkward to break the fourth wall so late in the book. In the latter third of the book, surprising narrative shifts are made to include the voices of Talia's siblings, raised in the U.S. Hence the book's wonderful first sentence: 'It was her idea to tie up the nun.' Talia's cross-country journey is interwoven with the story of her parents' early romance, their migration to the United States, her father's deportation, her grandmother's death, the struggle to reunite.

Having committed a violent crime not long before she was scheduled to leave her father in Bogotá to join her mother and siblings in New Jersey, she winds up in a horrible Catholic juvie from which she must escape in order to make her plane. Weaving Andean myth and natural symbolism into her narrative-condors signify mating for life, jaguars revenge the embattled Colombians are 'a singed species of birds without feathers who can still fly' children born in one country and raised in another are 'repotted flowers, creatures forced to live in the wrong habitat'-she follows Talia, the youngest child, on a complex journey.

recovers from the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, from the misery of separations on the border, from both the idea and the reality of a wall around the United States, Engel's vital story of a divided Colombian family is a book we need to read. 'People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics-the elements most likely to ruin a life. A 15-year-old girl in Colombia, doing time in a remote detention center, orchestrates a jail break and tries to get home.

Infinite country review