Chasing shadows

Lucrecia Guerrero's shimmering debut collection paints a vivid, beautiful, and haunting portrait of life in a fictional U.S./Mexican border town as it traces the crossed paths of a cast of characters whose lives intersect in surprising ways. By turns funny, poetic, and clear-sighted, appealing to readers of Laura Esquivel, Isabel Allende, and Sandra Cisneros, Guerrero's stories reveal the moments in which we consciously and unconsciously reveal ourselves. A mother and twenty-year U.S. citizen still ashamed of her "imperfect" immigrant background, agrees to report illegals at the border with a pair of loaned binoculars. A local man's rough but naive past lets him confuse a momentary connection with a female bus passenger as part of an entire romantic future in which he has no place. An aging and meticulous dandy known as the "White Dove" is accompanied by his daughter to meet an old friend who she secretly knows will never arrive. Two young brothers infatuated with the same self-possessed girl adopt different attitudes to sweet and shocking result. As their lives interweave between the stories, the resonance of their hopes and fears in shared circumstance draw a deep sense of collective emotional longing and a sense of place that is simply unforgettable.