“The great panoramic social novel that Los
Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by
the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity. With
The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis
its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and
deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it
really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and
ambitions. Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of
three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the
Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but
the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless
you count Scott Torres, though you’d never suspect he was half Mexican but for
his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial
pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children
shouldn’t hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight,
Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little
aliens she’s never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable,
and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that
old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the
bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the
boys. If she only knew . . .
With a precise eye for the telling detail and
an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a
panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a
father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver
a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.”
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