Just released today is my pick of the week: The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar. It is the story of Araceli, a Mexican live-in maid for the Torres-Thompsons, and what happens when she wakes up one morning to find herself alone with the two Torres-Thompson boys and no parents in sight. After trying and failing to locate them, Araceli sets off with the boys to find their grandfather, a mysterious figure that Araceli only knows through a photo in an album. Set in current day Los Angeles, Tobar’s novel explores the social and economical differences between classes. Here’s what the reviewers are saying:
“Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries is that rare novel that redefines a city. It has the necessary vital sweep of culture and class that brings a city to life, but its power lies in Tobar’s ability to persuasively change the perspective from which the Los Angeles of the present—and, by extension, the United States—is seen. This book confirms the promise of Tobar’s debut novel, The Tattooed Soldier.” —Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan and The Coast of Chicago
“The Barbarian Nurseries is a huge novel of this century, as sprawling and exciting as Los Angeles itself, one that tracks a Mexican immigrant maid not only as static decor in ‘real’ America’s economic rise and fall. Like yard workers and cooks, construction laborers and seamstresses, Tobar’s Araceli has flesh, brains, dreams, ambition, history, culture, voice: a rich, generous life. A story that was demanded, we can celebrate that it is now here.” —Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning and The Flowers
“Héctor Tobar’s novel is astonishing, like a many-layered mural on a long wall in Los Angeles, a tapestry of people and neighborhoods and stories. A vivid testament to Southern California as the world. Araceli is so unexpected and unique; she’s a character America needs to see, and this novel takes her on a journey America needs to understand.” —Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon
“Tobar delivers a riveting, insightful morality tale of conspicuously consuming Americans and their Mexican servants in the O.C. . . . Tobar is both inventive and relentless in pricking the pretentious social consciences of his entitled Americans, though he also casts a sober look on the foibles of the Mexicans who serve them. His sharp eye for Southern California culture, spiraling plot twists, ecological awareness, and ample willingness to dole out come-uppance to the nauseatingly privileged may put readers in mind of T. C. Boyle.” —Publishers Weekly
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