This slim volume of 10 interconnected stories contains many lifetimes of love, longing and loss. Mostly set in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley with forays back to Mexico, the stories--evocative, poignant, sexy, funny and dense with ritual and celebration--center on the Rowe family. Andi, the title character, has a Mexican mother and Irish-American father; her "bolero" is a song such as the old troubadors wrote and sang, reflecting in its lyrics the loves and lives of their people. Some stories making up Andi's life song bridge the border between an old world and a new; others are set wholly in the New World, with all its attendant difficulties and none of the comforts of tradition.
Andi is an architecture student in New York, trying to stay connected to friends in L.A. Her sweetheart, Pete, is torn between career desires: becoming a doctor or a musician. Their separation is the occasion of Pete's own "bolero" for Andi. Her best friend, Inez Suarez, is looking for love in all the wrong places, asking, "A man? Do they come in faithful?" In "What Would Mary Do," Dulce considers a religious vocation because, at 35, she seems to be out of options; however, if she just opened her eyes and took in what is right around her....
If you listen closely, you can hear in these stories the haunting strains of the best Latin music; those long, mournful chords that tell the whole story of what happens to people as they try to make connections and succeed or fail--and try again. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.