Meet Estrella, a girl coming of age in rural California. Estrella and her family work as agricultural laborers in California. While California’s pastures of plenty paint a beautiful backdrop for the casual visitor, or more likely, the vast majority of Americans who buy the cheap produce shipped from the Central Valley to the four corners of the nation, the peach and grape orchards are the site of brutal labor conditions and little pay for Estrella’s family. The story of Estrella’s life takes shape for the reader out of fragmentary snippets of dialogue and scene-setting; the narrative constantly shifts perspective between characters in each scene.
In Under the Feet of Jesus, farm workers depend on their health, a running car, and abundant harvests in order to support their existence. All of these elements are uncertain and ultimately at the mercy of the natural world. Yet it is the un-natural human intervention of pesticide exposure which spurs the plot of Viramontes’ novel towards its enigmatic conclusion. Alejo, a teen who is friends with Estrella, is run down by a crop duster while stealing peaches from an orchard. Despite the high probability that the pilot of the duster would have been able to see Alejo running as fast as he could through the orchard, the plane’s shadow passes over Alejo “like a crucifix” before he is immersed in toxic spray. The disposable Alejo is poisoned, and falls to the care of Estrella’s family.
In order to save Alejo from the “daño of the fields,” Estrella must come to recognize Alejo will receive no help from the economic and political system which poisoned him in the first place. She’ll have to grasp the terrible tendrils of economic, racial, and environmental injustice in order to articulate her power within these unjust systems. In short, she’ll have to take action for herself, no matter the consequences to her own safety.
Under the Feet of Jesus is lean (only 176 pages in length) but rich in poetry, complex formal innovation, and weighty subject matter. Steinbeck fans will find some interesting allusions and inversions of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden within Under the Feet of Jesus. With haunting, elegiac prose that highlights the natural beauty of California alongside the harsh poverty farm workers experience to this day, Viramontes matches Steinbeck stride for stride in this taught, powerful novel of the American West.
Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by: Shane D. Hall
Rating: Peachy! Read Under the Feet of Jesus and realize how rotten that rating is.
Published in 2009, The Windup Girl is the first novel by Paolo Bacigalupi. Winner of the Hugo and Nubela Awards (Sci-fi industry top prizes), The Windup Girl is set in a near-future Thailand. The kingdom of Thailand is a kind of fortress state, crouched in a defensive stance vis a vis the rest of the world. And not without reason; rogue diseases such as “blister rust,” “cibiscosis” and others only obliquely hinted at are poised to destroy Thai sovereignty. These diseases are both the unintentional, and quite intentional machinations of “calorie companies” (think Monsanto, Cargill, etc.) who have “taken over the world” by enslaving its peoples to genetically modified crops resistant to the latest competitive enterprise plagues. The plagues have greatly depleted natural biodiversity, and only those nations who have jealously cultivated and guarded seed banks have the bio-capital to engineer food and energy independence from the Iowa-based calorie companies. Bangkok runs expensive coal-fired fuel pumps to keep the city alive below rising seas, and the Environmental Ministry ruthlessly fights “Trade” and other foreign “invasives.”
Anne Perry paints such realistic pictures regardless of the period she is writing about and this first novel of likable British characters who find themselves on the brink of war draws the reader into a very different world from what we have today–a world where war is unthinkable instead of almost commonplace. I wouldn’t call this light summer reading, but it certainly isn’t very taxing and does bog down at times. Still, the novel takes us back in time to a very different mindset and I found that curiously refreshing. Great for taking along on vacation!
It is the fourth book in a series about a female bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum. The book is a fast paced light-hearted read, even though it contains dead bodies and explosions. It is not necessary to have read any of the other books as the author introduces the main characters as they appear.
Twenty-four years after her mother and two sisters are brutally murdered in their own home in the early hours of January 3, 1985, Libby Day is out of money and seemingly out of options. Being only seven-years-old at the time of the murders–giving a coached testimony that would convict and send her brother Ben to jail for the crime–Libby looks back into her painful past and uncovers secrets and twists that will change her life and her family forever. When Libby gets caught up with a “Kill Club,” a group of crime-obsessed locals, she is encouraged to investigate and eventually discover the unthinkable truth regarding her family’s deaths.