Roaming Colombia's rebellious decades at the turn of the 21st century, Julianne Pachico's first novel echoes the surrealistic ambience of that country's most famous modern writer, Gabriel García Márquez. The Lucky Ones navigates from the city of Cali's wealthy youth to paramilitary revolutionaries in mountain jungles, idealistic visiting teachers and even a Colombian expat working the fringes of New York City's cocaine parties. With a mix of first-, third- and second-person narrative, Pachico crafts a fictional world in which, before going to the mall, rich teen girls "yank their jeans down as far as they can go, tug at their tank tops to reveal bra straps underneath, peach and pink and black," and FARC rebels kidnap, incarcerate and murder in "their fatigues. Their berets. With their long, slow jungle marches, slipping and sliding through the mud."
A British citizen pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia, Pachico grew up in Cali, experiencing firsthand the political and social turmoil that she captures so well. It's a world of displacement and inexplicable disappearance in which "it is normal for children to attend school regularly... then abruptly never be seen again. Gangs move in... families move out." A worn-out dissident soldier in the jungle perhaps says it best: "When this--all of this--is over (whatever this means, whatever over means).... I'll come strolling down the mountainside." The dreamlike drama that was Colombia back then ends, in T.S. Eliot's words, "Not with a bang, but a whimper." Pachico's fiction demonstrates how that makes perfect sense. She is one to watch. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.