Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
It's April 1969, and fourteen-year-old Yolanda Sahagún can hardly wait to see her favorite brother, Chuy, newly returned from Vietnam. But when he arrives at the Welcome Home party the family has prepared in his honor it's clear that the war has changed him. The transformation of Chuy is only one of the challenges that Yolanda and the rest of her family face. This powerful coming-of-age novel, winner of the 1999 Chicano/Latino Literary Contest, is a touching and funny account of a summer that is still remembered as a crossroads in American life. Yolanda and her brothers and sisters learn how to be men and women and how to be Americans as well as Mexican Americans.
"A captivating portrayal . . . .the novel is challenging, warm, provocative, often humorous, always engaging."--Rudolfo Anaya
"Patricia Santana's Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquillity will take you on an exhilarating journey through the tortured landscape of the late 1960s, and show you how the stench of a brutal foreign war and revolutionary winds at home swept into the lives on one Mexican American family in Southern California. . . . Santana takes her place among those new Chicana writers who are refashioning the face of American literature for the twenty-first century."--Jorge Mariscal, University of California, San Diego, author of Aztlan and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seasoned with salty dashes of Spanish and radiant with family warmth and affection, Santana's 1999 Chicano/Latino Literary Contest winning first novel tells the tender coming-of-age tale of a young Chicana in 1969 San Diego. Fourteen-year-old Yolanda "Yoli" Sahag n, the seventh of nine children, is overjoyed to be planning the coming-home celebration for her favorite brother, Chuy, a soldier returning from the Vietnam War. But when he arrives, he is distant, despondent and violent, clearly not the same man who was drafted years before. Early the next morning, he inexplicably leaves town on his prized motorcycle for points unknown. This development disappoints and worries Yolanda, who is meanwhile battling adolescent troubles of her own: bad skin, sprouting breasts and budding love for popular, timid schoolmate Francisco. When Chuy eventually returns home once again, he remains distant, disrespectful and even cruel, hurling anti-Mexican slurs at friends and family. His much-foreshadowed emotional meltdown occurs when a traditional night game of hide-and-seek goes heinously awry, forcing him to evade police prosecution and go into hiding. The author injects a surprising amount of humor into this often sobering tale, mostly through her account of Yoli's escapades as she tries to stay afloat on the turbulent waters of puberty. Wonderfully realistic dialogue, Yoli's candid first-person narration and a feel-good conclusion replete with wedding bells round out this remarkably touching story about the ramifications of war on a shatterproof Mexican family.
