<\/p>\n
\u201cNormal? \u00bfNormal? \u00bfQue es normal?\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Fight Like a Man and Other Stories We Tell Our Children<\/strong><\/em><\/a> is reporter Christine Granados<\/strong><\/a>\u2019s first collection of short fiction, comprising seven stories and the eponymous novella. Many of these stories were previously published in such literary journals as Huizache Magazine<\/em> and Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas<\/em>. This is a strong collection, mostly set in El Paso, Texas, featuring working-class characters, both Anglo and Latin@, chafing against the frequently uncomfortable ties that bind.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The novella Fight Like a Man<\/em> is a standout. Mon\u00edca is middle-aged, married with two teenagers, when she discovers herself pregnant by her younger lover. As she debates her options, Mon\u00edca and her half-sister must decide what to do with the ashes of their father, long-deceased, who had two families\u2014one in Ju\u00e1rez and another in El Paso. Mon\u00edca is more like her father than she\u2019d like to admit, and so is her lover. It\u2019s complicated.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Granados finds humor amidst grief in \u201cAddressed.\u201d Carmen must call family and friends to break the news of her mother\u2019s death. Paging through her mother\u2019s address book, she finds her Aunt Vanessa listed under \u201cT\u201d for t\u00ed<\/span><\/span><\/span>a, her former stepfather listed under \u201cC\u201d for cabr\u00f3n. \u201cStupids\u201d is a lesson in why Texas schools need MAS, and I\u2019d like to nominate \u201cGood Father\u201d in a fantastic-first-line competition: \u201cOpening day in Alamo City\u2019s freshly raked baseball field started with all the fanfare and cattiness of New York\u2019s fashion week.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another standout is \u201cShelf Life.\u201d Trini Lopez is a single mother with a thirteen-year-old daughter who she believes \u201cwaste[s] too much of her life on \u2026 dusty, worn, and dog-eared books.\u201d Her daughter wants shelves so she\u2019ll have somewhere to put her books, but Trini claims not to have the money to spend on bookshelves. As she upbraids her daughter, Trini points with her manicured nails and her gold bangles slide up and down her forearms. So much is packed into these six pages.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Small, deftly observed details (\u201csand puddles against the curb\u201d) anchor you in a particular place. El Paso is a presence, as is Ju\u00e1rez (the Kentucky Club, San Elizario, the Franklin Mountains, Western Playland), and the seamless mix of English and Spanish is a pleasure, further evoking la frontera. The population has taken the two worlds they straddle and constructed a third.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Polished yet raw, Fight Like a Man<\/em> is about intimate, intricate human relationships in all their complex motivations and emotional nuance, and how we tend to prefer the devil we know.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Review of El Paso short stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[216,12,8,16,130,15],"class_list":["post-889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bookreview","tag-lonestarreview","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-review","tag-shortstories","tag-texasauthor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889","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=889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}