redroofcolleen's review
4.0
Painful in their honesty and violence, these stories are beautiful in the telling but difficult to endure.
spacebee's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
chelseamartinez's review
5.0
I loved all of these stories. There is a very specific current of polite-woman-filling-with-rage-regret-and-circuitous-anger that runs through almost all of them; the way a lot of the characters respond/react/reflect their family and their surroundings is so close the way I experienced being out in the world when I was younger (and a majority of the protagonists in this collection are young Latinas). In particular, a specific way of feeling as though having awful thoughts or angry feelings make you disloyal, and a particular way that "lucky" (good or bad) events play out are so realistic, or at least match my specific non-realistic view of the world.
Favorites
1) Mojave Rats
2) The Five Wounds
3) The Guest House
4) Jubilee
5) Ordinary Sins
Favorites
1) Mojave Rats
2) The Five Wounds
3) The Guest House
4) Jubilee
5) Ordinary Sins
dylanperry's review
5.0
Night at the Fiestas is in that rare 1% of short story collections wherein each story is a home run. I'm trying to think of another collection to compare it with, and there is (for me) none. It's rare when I'm enjoying a book so much I actually force myself to slow down and savor it, but even the two weeks I spent with this flew by far too quickly. This is a breathtaking debut collection that has put Kirstin Valdez Quade up there with my other favorite short story writers--George Saunders, Junot Diaz, and Andre Dubus III. I will read anything she puts out.
In 2018 I plan on rereading some books I've given 5 stars to see if they hold up to a second reading, and you can believe Night at the Fiestas will be among them. I'm already anticipating returning to these stories, and if that isn't the mark of great writing, then I don't know what is.
In 2018 I plan on rereading some books I've given 5 stars to see if they hold up to a second reading, and you can believe Night at the Fiestas will be among them. I'm already anticipating returning to these stories, and if that isn't the mark of great writing, then I don't know what is.
lizmart88's review
3.0
Let's start with the good - the stories are full of interesting characters and situations. I really enjoyed reading them. It's set in the Southwest United States and features lots of Latino and Mexican American culture.
The art of short stories is knowing when to end, when the characters have developed (quickly) and reached a turning point. I'm not sure these stories are well developed enough to have reached that point.
The other drawback is that many of these stories seem too similar. They tend to run together with similar characters and settings and dynamics.
All in all,a good story collection. I recommend if you're a fan of Southwest fiction especially!
The art of short stories is knowing when to end, when the characters have developed (quickly) and reached a turning point. I'm not sure these stories are well developed enough to have reached that point.
The other drawback is that many of these stories seem too similar. They tend to run together with similar characters and settings and dynamics.
All in all,a good story collection. I recommend if you're a fan of Southwest fiction especially!
jennyshank's review
5.0
Published in Dallas Morning News, 20 March 2015 09:41 PM
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s remarkable debut story collection Night at the Fiestas, set mainly in tight-knit Catholic, Mexican-American communities in New Mexico, enthralls with tales of people striving to better their lives while enduring the aftermath of past mistakes. Those mistakes have a way of lingering visibly, emanating tension, often in the form of children of failed relationships.
Valdez Quade’s characters run the gamut of experience from an unmarried, uneducated, pregnant young woman who is somehow the linchpin of stability in the office of the Catholic church where she works (“Ordinary Sins”), to a man who returns to Albuquerque after his grandmother’s death to find his deadbeat dad and a pregnant boa constrictor squatting in her guest house (“Guest House”). There’s also a wealthy white woman from the East Coast who moves to New Mexico and hires a Latina housekeeper, whom she attempts to absorb as a family member (“Canute Commands the Tides”).
In the masterful “The Five Wounds,” a man named Amadeo Padilla makes an unlikely Jesus, chosen to carry a heavy cross in a Holy Week re-enactment of Christ’s Passion that the men of a New Mexico town organize every year. “Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck.”
Valdez Quade writes this story in present tense, amping up the immediacy and building suspense over whether Amadeo will choose to ask for nails to be pounded into his hands, as one legendary town Jesus portrayer did decades before. Amadeo is a loser in need of redemption: jobless, living at home with his mother ever since he abandoned his daughter Angel, who nevertheless turns up at Amadeo’s mother’s house, 15 and pregnant, looking for a place to stay.
In Valdez Quade’s skilled hands, the familiar Catholic tropes of penitence, grace and redemption, which could so easily become heavy-handed, feel fresh, funny and loose. “I’m carrying the cross this year,” Amadeo says when Angel arrives on his doorstep. “I’m Jesus.”
“And I’m the Virgin Mary,” Angel replies, her pregnant “belly as hard and round as an adobe horno.”
Catholicism mingles with Southwestern folk beliefs such as La Llorona and mal de ojo, the evil eye, to produce a potent thematic stew in this collection, which features several young women trying to break free of the burden of their heritage. In the title story, it’s 1960 and good girl Frances rides on the bus her father drives between Raton and Santa Fe to meet her bolder, prettier cousin for the annual fiestas “celebrating 268 years since de Vargas’ retaking of Santa Fe.” Drunken revelry in the plaza is in the offing.
“If Frances’ life was to be a novel — as Frances fully intended,” Valdez Quade writes, “then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.” Something does, in the form of an insulting beatnik, but it leaves Frances more unsettled than invigorated.
A contemporary striver stars in “Jubilee.” Andrea, the daughter of a field-hand supervisor on a California blueberry farm, returns from her freshman year at Stanford to attend a high-class party on the farm of her dad’s boss. Andrea’s dad has been trying to earn extra money through a burrito truck, and they’ve hired him to serve at the party, while Andrea aims to humble the boss’s daughter, also a Stanford student, who has snubbed her on occasion.
As Andrea commits gaffe after gaffe, Valdez Quade brings the reader to empathize with the awkwardness of her position. Andrea, she writes, would “forever be checking ethnicity boxes, emphasizing her parents’ work: farm laborer, housekeeper. Trying to prove that she was smart enough, committed enough, pleasant enough, to be granted a trial period in their world.”
No one gets off easy in Valdez Quade’s fiction. All her characters grapple with moral questions that circumstances force them to face head on rather than brush off or ignore. Valdez Quade is a gifted storyteller with an eye for quirky, compelling detail, and her first story collection is a poised and polished debut.
Jenny Shank’s novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/books/20150320-short-stories-review-night-at-the-fiestas-by-kirstin-valdez-quade.ece
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s remarkable debut story collection Night at the Fiestas, set mainly in tight-knit Catholic, Mexican-American communities in New Mexico, enthralls with tales of people striving to better their lives while enduring the aftermath of past mistakes. Those mistakes have a way of lingering visibly, emanating tension, often in the form of children of failed relationships.
Valdez Quade’s characters run the gamut of experience from an unmarried, uneducated, pregnant young woman who is somehow the linchpin of stability in the office of the Catholic church where she works (“Ordinary Sins”), to a man who returns to Albuquerque after his grandmother’s death to find his deadbeat dad and a pregnant boa constrictor squatting in her guest house (“Guest House”). There’s also a wealthy white woman from the East Coast who moves to New Mexico and hires a Latina housekeeper, whom she attempts to absorb as a family member (“Canute Commands the Tides”).
In the masterful “The Five Wounds,” a man named Amadeo Padilla makes an unlikely Jesus, chosen to carry a heavy cross in a Holy Week re-enactment of Christ’s Passion that the men of a New Mexico town organize every year. “Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck.”
Valdez Quade writes this story in present tense, amping up the immediacy and building suspense over whether Amadeo will choose to ask for nails to be pounded into his hands, as one legendary town Jesus portrayer did decades before. Amadeo is a loser in need of redemption: jobless, living at home with his mother ever since he abandoned his daughter Angel, who nevertheless turns up at Amadeo’s mother’s house, 15 and pregnant, looking for a place to stay.
In Valdez Quade’s skilled hands, the familiar Catholic tropes of penitence, grace and redemption, which could so easily become heavy-handed, feel fresh, funny and loose. “I’m carrying the cross this year,” Amadeo says when Angel arrives on his doorstep. “I’m Jesus.”
“And I’m the Virgin Mary,” Angel replies, her pregnant “belly as hard and round as an adobe horno.”
Catholicism mingles with Southwestern folk beliefs such as La Llorona and mal de ojo, the evil eye, to produce a potent thematic stew in this collection, which features several young women trying to break free of the burden of their heritage. In the title story, it’s 1960 and good girl Frances rides on the bus her father drives between Raton and Santa Fe to meet her bolder, prettier cousin for the annual fiestas “celebrating 268 years since de Vargas’ retaking of Santa Fe.” Drunken revelry in the plaza is in the offing.
“If Frances’ life was to be a novel — as Frances fully intended,” Valdez Quade writes, “then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.” Something does, in the form of an insulting beatnik, but it leaves Frances more unsettled than invigorated.
A contemporary striver stars in “Jubilee.” Andrea, the daughter of a field-hand supervisor on a California blueberry farm, returns from her freshman year at Stanford to attend a high-class party on the farm of her dad’s boss. Andrea’s dad has been trying to earn extra money through a burrito truck, and they’ve hired him to serve at the party, while Andrea aims to humble the boss’s daughter, also a Stanford student, who has snubbed her on occasion.
As Andrea commits gaffe after gaffe, Valdez Quade brings the reader to empathize with the awkwardness of her position. Andrea, she writes, would “forever be checking ethnicity boxes, emphasizing her parents’ work: farm laborer, housekeeper. Trying to prove that she was smart enough, committed enough, pleasant enough, to be granted a trial period in their world.”
No one gets off easy in Valdez Quade’s fiction. All her characters grapple with moral questions that circumstances force them to face head on rather than brush off or ignore. Valdez Quade is a gifted storyteller with an eye for quirky, compelling detail, and her first story collection is a poised and polished debut.
Jenny Shank’s novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/books/20150320-short-stories-review-night-at-the-fiestas-by-kirstin-valdez-quade.ece
simplyb's review
4.0
A book of short stories whose common thread is the Southwest United States and told (mostly) from a female perspective, it uses the sublime but barren harshness of the desert to highlight the struggles of mostly women, primarily those of Native/Hispanic origin, and reflects on their humanness and their failings, there situational hopelessness and their fights against, and sometimes relenting to, being broken. Told with a straightforwardly eloquent prosody, you can't help but ache for each character who tells you her story. For that reason, this was a bit of a hard book to read as you knew that everybody was inevitably going to be succumbing to the weight of the world in their own way. But each story had flashes of self-awareness and growth, of insight into the perpetual battles we as humans wage against and in spite of ourselves, and as such provided fodder for thought, a blossom within the sandy reaches of the New Mexican and surrounding desert landscape.
meghan_is_reading's review
Geeze, every story is like a bruise to the heart. Good but man, don't read em all at once.
beebottoms's review
5.0
Kirsten Valdez Quade writes her narrative and dialogue like a spread of butter on toast, seamlessly connected and constantly enjoyable. I'm probably overreaching my own abilities but I feel like she writes in a style very much like mine - or at least the style I love to write and want to write. That's a big reason why I'm so drawn to her stories here. Her first sentences grab me and the rest of the stories continue to pull me in in very straightforward, honest language that I can only describe as bright and sharp. The writing is energetic, youthful and perceptive. It's a very contemporary voice that I've been looking for! Maybe it's because most of her protagonists are interesting young females, but all the characters are colorfully portrayed.
Most of the stories are about family relationships especially between parent(s) and child. I love love love the first story 'Nemecia'. There's a brilliant air of mischief surrounding a pretty simple premise. Others I really love are 'The Five Wounds', 'Night at the Fiestas', 'Jubilee' and 'Family Reunion'. The others are wonderful too, each one unique. Except for the last story, 'The Manzanos' - that one was quite all over the place.
One thing about the writing that stuck out oddly a bit, to me, was how the author ended most of the stories. The endings were pretty abrupt and confusing... But maybe it's just my poor understanding. Great debut collection! I can't wait to read more from the author :)
Most of the stories are about family relationships especially between parent(s) and child. I love love love the first story 'Nemecia'. There's a brilliant air of mischief surrounding a pretty simple premise. Others I really love are 'The Five Wounds', 'Night at the Fiestas', 'Jubilee' and 'Family Reunion'. The others are wonderful too, each one unique. Except for the last story, 'The Manzanos' - that one was quite all over the place.
One thing about the writing that stuck out oddly a bit, to me, was how the author ended most of the stories. The endings were pretty abrupt and confusing... But maybe it's just my poor understanding. Great debut collection! I can't wait to read more from the author :)