Vida
Patricia Engel
Black Cat/Grove Atlantic, 194 pp., $14 paperback original
Reviewed by Betsy Willeford
By the time you?ve read a few of these stories, you?ll think you know the narrator. Sabina?s voice ? frightened, angry, amused, dry, detached, compassionate, warm and always frank ? is the thread that ties this earthy, poignant collection together. Born in New Jersey to upscale Colombian immigrants, Sabina has all the social and tribal strikes against her. Her family lives in a suburb where everyone else with tan skin is somebody?s maid.
She endures the requisite creepy old aunt who hobbles in from Manhattan to die slowly in the living room, the obligatory trips back to Colombia to visit family, the warped GPS that hurtles her toward every guy who is attractive for all the wrong reasons.
The guys and the losses are numerous in this debut collection, and multiply as Sabina leaves home for Manhattan and Miami. She?s doomed to emotional and geographic exile, and she knows it.
She learns that her friend Vida was brought to the United States to work as a prostitute and escapes with the help of the security guard who keeps her in indentured servitude. She listens to her Colombian relatives squabble over niceties, while outside the window, Sabina sees evidence of poverty for which her life in America hasn?t prepared her.
I think I went to high school with Sabina ? or I wish I had.
Betsy Willeford is a freelance writer from Miami.
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