Helpful Score: 3
This is a lighthearted story of a group of friends who want to travel to America to find men that will come back to their village in Mexico to defend them from hooligans. The author seems to get off track every now and again but is able to bring it back in.
Helpful Score: 2
The main character, Nayeli, embarks on a journey to the United States to find The Magnificent Seven, to bring them back to Tres Camerones for protection and to help repopulate the town. Along with her on her journey are Yolo, Vampi, & Tacho. Tia Irma stayed behind and kept the home fires burning. What follows is a tale, at times funny and at times heartbreaking, of the quartets quest to find Nayelis father and the seven men they were convinced could save their town.
The story grew on me and about halfway through, I couldnt put it down.
The story grew on me and about halfway through, I couldnt put it down.
Extremely funny! I'm not sure if you'll get all the humor if you're not able to follow along with the occasional renderings of badly spoken English or slangy Spanish. The characters are well drawn, and you can't help but root for them on their improbably quest to get across the border and bring back 7 warriors to save their small Mexican town from the bandidos.
Being that it was coming from Luis Alberto Urrea of The Hummingbird's Daughter, I assumed it was historical fiction. It was not. On the first Youtube mention I kind of groaned. I also assumed from how good THD was that this would be good. It was not. The dialogue was all sentence fragments and non sequitur ramblings. There was very little character development, to the point where I didn't really know why the characters did anything they did. It was an interesting premise, but execution was ultimately pretty poor. I'll be skipping any of Urrea's future contemporary novels and will stick with his HF.
