{"id":869,"date":"2018-12-31T14:26:24","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=869"},"modified":"2018-12-31T14:26:24","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:26:24","slug":"898","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=869","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book Review: THE INEXPLICABLE LOGIC OF MY LIFE"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cjust because my love isn\u2019t perfect doesn\u2019t mean I don\u2019t love you\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Seventeen-year-old Salvador \u201cSally\u201d Silva likes his life. What he doesn\u2019t like is change. Beginning his senior year at El Paso High School, Sally has a great relationship with Vicente, his adoptive father; a steadfast best friend of many years, Samantha \u201cSammy\u201d Diaz; and a loving extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and his grandmother Mima. But when Sally, an easygoing guy with \u201ca control thing over [himself]\u201d who prefers \u201ckeeping it calm,\u201d gets into a fistfight on the first day of school, he begins to wonder about his \u201cbio father\u201d for the first time, and doubting that he really knows himself at all. \u201cMaybe the kind of guy I was was like someone I didn\u2019t know,\u201d Sally thinks. \u201cYou know, the guy I\u2019d never met whose genes I had.\u201d Then Sally\u2019s Mima gets sick, his father\u2019s former boyfriend returns, and his friends\u2019 lives are turned upside down, forcing Sally to confront impending adulthood and question what it means to be a man.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Inexplicable Logic of My Life<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/em> is the new young-adult novel from PEN\/Faulkner award-winning Benjamin Alire S\u00e1enz. This is a heartwarming coming-of-age story in which S\u00e1enz inhabits Sally on the cusp of \u201clife beginning,\u201d bringing his first-person narration uncannily alive in beautifully rendered relationships.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Sally wants the human heart to make rational sense, but he and his friends learn that there are as many ways of loving as there are people on the planet. Mima feeds people; Vicente loves his sports-loving brothers by reading the sports pages of the newspaper so he can have a conversation with them; Uncle Mickey loves by slipping money into the hands of his nieces and nephews. Sally discovers \u201clove is difficult and complicated,\u201d and that love, not blood, creates a family.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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These characters are sharply delineated individuals. Sammy is beautiful, smart, ambitious, and emotionally volatile. \u201cShe could be a storm. But she could be a soft candle lighting up a dark room.\u201d Vicente is a Columbia-educated painter and professor of art, a gay Mexican American who loves art because \u201cit civilized the world.\u201d Fito is an \u201cintellectual\u201d who ends every other sentence with \u201cand shit,\u201d who walks \u201clike a coyote looking for food\u201d and whose mother barters her Lone Star card for meth.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Inexplicable Logic of My Life<\/em> is a long book, but a quick read; it just flows. Language and the magic of words are important to these characters, and S\u00e1enz\u2019s choices are precise. His teenage dialogue sounds authentic, especially the \u201cverbal volleyball\u201d between Sally and Sammy. Happily, El Paso is a presence in this story. \u201cI like that you could see and smell the border in the air and on the streets,\u201d Sally says, \u201cand in the talk of the few people we passed who spoke the special kind of language that wasn\u2019t really Spanish and wasn\u2019t really English.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I will miss these characters. To paraphrase Sally, I like who these kids are becoming. S\u00e1enz has done the thing that is the reason for fiction.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Review of The Inexplicable Logic of My Life <\/em>by Benjamin Alire S\u00e1enz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,55,12,8,15,76],"class_list":["post-869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fiction","tag-literaryfiction","tag-lonestarreview","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-texasauthor","tag-yafiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}