An immigrant’s tale—the specter of a life abandoned, the perilous promise of a better future—can make for compelling drama. Author Farnoosh Moshiri’s forced flight from revolutionary Iran in 1983 (she would end up in Houston for a time) provides an intriguing back story for her searingly beautiful novel Against Gravity (Penguin Books). It’s the tale of Iranian immigrant Roya Saraabi and her daughter, Tala, who escape horrific events in their homeland to find an unsettled existence in Houston. The narrative is triangulated, told first in the voice of Madison Kirby, an AIDS-afflicted neighbor who stalks Roya; then by Roya, who reveals her and Tala’s tortuous journey to Texas; and finally, by Ric Cardinal, a social worker weighed down by a lifetime of grief. Moshiri writes with a spare and effective elegance that makes Against Gravity a stunning piece of fiction. Reviewed by Mike Shea
Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893–1923 (Cinco Puntos) is a horseless carriage ride back to the dawn of the twentieth century, when revolution seemed to be carried around the world on the wind. And as portrayed by David Dorado Romo in this self-described “psychogeography,” there was no hotter bed of revolt than the border cities of El Paso and Juárez, Mexico. Drawing largely from contemporaneous newspaper accounts, Romo offers a fresh perspective on characters we thought we knew well, like Pancho Villa, and introduces several who deserve a larger measure of renown, like Teresita Urrea. Ringside Seat is a fine piece of pop history and a rude Rosetta Stone for deciphering the 1910’s, when the socialist menace truly was knocking on America’s back door. M.S. Reviewed by Mike Shea
Austinite R.J. Pineiro hits plenty of high notes in his near-future techno-thriller, Havoc (Forge). The year is 2009, and a spiffy military-strength robot orb stolen from the U.S. Nanosolutions compound in Central Texas is loose in Europe. It has switched into survival mode, replicating itself and resolving to wipe out all those pesky humans. Former CIA officer Tom Grant is brought back into the game to go after multinational CyberWerke, who might be behind the theft and, oh, yes, want to rule the world. Pineiro is brilliant at dreaming up nanodevices for his spooks and imagining virtual reality battles in cyberspace. But he strikes wrong chords aplenty by arming Agent Grant with an arsenal of sophomoric innuendo and a bottomless supply of schoolboy horniness. M.S. Reviewed by Mike Shea
My Library
