However, though ambitious, the conceit isn’t carried all the way through-as a result, the two strands don’t come together convincingly. In the collection’s most structurally interesting story, “Holyoke, Mass.: An Ethnography,” an anonymous narrator responds to the publication of an ethnographic account of her hometown by providing her own, truer version: interweaving the story of Veronica, a girl featured in the ethnography, with the cultural and industrial history of Holyoke. Rodriguez’s characters struggle with, covet, and seek to subvert their familial and cultural legacies of suffering from love.
Rodriguez’s uneven debut introduces readers to a cast of characters who range from unhinged aunts to scholarship students at a private New York City high school to legendary Puerto Rican poet and activist Julia de Burgos.
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