The author gives us an extraordinary new novel, told in language of blazing originality: a multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancy - the very stuff of life.
Lala Reyes grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl, makers. The striped caramelo rebozo is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to the other side : Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family s stories, separating the truth from the healthy lies that have ricocheted from one generation to the next. We travel from the Mexico City that was the Paris of the New World to the music-filled streets of Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties - and, finally, to Lala s own difficult adolescence in the not-quite-promised land of San Antonio, Texas.
Every year, Ceyala "Lala" Reyes' family-aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, and Lala's six older brothers-packs up three cars and, in a wild ride, drive from Chicago to the Little Grandfather and Awful Grandmother's house in Mexico City for the summer. Struggling to find a voice above the boom of her brothers and to understand her place on this side of the border and that, Lala is a shrewd observer of family life. But when she starts telling the Awful Grandmother's life story, seeking clues to how she got to be so awful, grandmother accuses Lala of exaggerating. Soon, a multigenerational family narrative turns into a whirlwind exploration of storytelling, lies, and life. Like the cherished rebozo, or shawl, that has been passed down through generations of Reyes women, Caramelo is alive with the vibrations of history, family, and love. From the winner of the 2018 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
