The Guardians: A Novel
Written and Narrated By: Ana Castillo
Length: 7 hrs and 52 mini
Oh good golly gosh—Loved the stories, loved the use of language. What a wonderful surprise!
Good heavens! Upon listening to the first few spoken sentences, I was grooooaning. It’s not always the case that the author can perform their own work, and it initially appeared that Ana Castillo should NOT be doing the narration for The Guardians. Our book opener, Tía Regina, seems feisty and full of life, and Ana Castillo?
Well, she has a bit of a drawl, a long and languid way of drawing words and vowels out, and I was dreading an almost 8 hours of fraught story as guided along by such lazy tones.
Soon, however, she caught a rhythm (Or p’raps I should say: I myself got into the flow of her…!), and I was carried away by her accent, and the story that followed.
Regina is the older-mid-aged woman, heroine of the book, and she lives in small town Cabuche, taking care of her 16-year old nephew, Gabo, and waiting for her little brother Rafa to cross the border. He’s been ages in this particular crossing, and the only word they’ve gotten is none too good: The coyotes he crossed with have left her an ominous phone message, and both she and Gabo are giving up hope. Gabo’s mom didn’t make it on a crossing several years ago. She and several other women were found bloated in the desert, mutilated, organs missing. Gabo lives with that particular nightmare, and Regina can’t stop worrying.
The Publisher’s Summary (Yeh yeh yeh: I read the danged thing cuz I was looking for Hispanic Heritage Month possibilities) purports this to be a story of a ragtag band of misfit-types who get together to find out where Rafa is, to bring him to Regina’s little home, reunite him with Gabo.
Uhm, nope.
Yeah, all the characters listed in the summary are here. Regina and Gabo, Miguel the divorced man who teaches at the school where Regina is a teacher’s aide—calling himself Chicano and all angst-ridden with revolutionary zeal, Miguel’s nearly deaf/somewhat myopic and crazy abuelo Milton, a few gangbangers from Gabo’s school, and “a wayward” priest. Sounds zany and wacky, doesn’t it? And yeah, all of ‘em are at Gabo’s thrown-together birthday party, and yeah, they all kinda are interested in Rafa and his fate.
But nope, this is NOT a zany and wacky band of people coming together and finding a sense of family. Nooooo this, it turns out, is kinda sorta where the woeful American Dirt left off: Life after the crossing/the dream. Those gangbangers aren’t cuddly outcasts but are parasites, living by sucking all that is good from their host who comes to them with hope in the heart. They tell Gabo they can find his father, but it’s gonna cost him… cost him dearly…
And Miguel has his own dysfunctional narrative, with a somewhat unconventional divorce on one hand even as he grasps for Regina with an empty other hand. Abuelo Milton? Okay, theeeeere’s where we FINALLY have the wacky; what a wonderful and warm light he is in this heavy work. I say heavy, but perhaps I should note that it’s heavy in its themes but not in its execution. Sure, this is how hard and scary it is to live in the shadows, a step away from deportation, constant chaos threatening the impoverished just getting by, whether it’s through acts of god or, even more, acts of man being inhumane to man -BUT- Castillo carries it off with a light touch and with definite humor. Regina, Miguel, and DEFinitely abuelo Milton see the world through a cockeyed scrunching of the eyes, and that brings a shimmering glow, an ease to a story which could’ve been too ponderous for words.
Which brings me to the stunning conclusion…
YIKES! I dunno what’s going on, but as of late? I’m getting hit with a LOT of Listens which go along, tra la la, excellent crafting, awesome character development -then- WHAM! GUT wrenching…! Just when I was getting used to love, to family, to hope… along comes a brutal dose of reality…and then?
More love, more family, more hope. I can’t give this 5-stars cuz I don’t sit well with the end-of-the-story sucker punch. But I can give it an ultra-high 4-stars cuz if there’s one thing that DOES sit well with me?
It’s walking through a pane of glass, shattering shattering shattering, almost bleeding out.
And then applying the peeping glow of hope to the wounds…
Do try this, and stick with the language, the use of Spanglish. Oh how I did relive my childhood on a Bordertown, listening to this. The rhythm, the flow, the light at the end of a very, very dark tunnel.
AWEsome!
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