Product Description

From American Book Award-winning author Ana Castillo comes a suspenseful, moving novel about a sensuous, smart, and fiercely independent woman. Eking out a living as a teacher’s aide in a small New Mexican border town, Tía Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo, a hardworking boy who has entered the country illegally and aspires to the priesthood. When Gabo’s father, Rafa, disappears while crossing over from Mexico, Regina fears the worst.

After several days of waiting and with an ominous phone call from a woman who may be connected to a smuggling ring, Regina and Gabo resolve to find Rafa. Help arrives in the form of Miguel, an amorous, recently divorced history teacher; Miguel’s gregarious abuelo Milton; a couple of Gabo’s gangbanger classmates; and a priest of wayward faith. Though their journey is rife with challenges and danger, it will serve as a remarkable testament to family bonds, cultural pride, and the human experience

Praise for The Guardians

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“An always skilled storyteller, [Castillo] grounds her writing in . . . humor, love, suspense and heartache–that draw the reader in.”
–Chicago Sunday Sun-Times

“A rollicking read, with jokes and suspense and joy rides and hearts breaking . . . This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience.”
–Los Angeles Times

“What drives the novel is its chorus of characters, all, in their own way, witnesses and guardian angels. In the end, Castillo’s unmistakable voice–earthy, impassioned, weaving a ‘hybrid vocabulary for a hybrid people’–is the book’s greatest revelation.”
–Time Out New York

“A wonderful novel . . . Castillo’s most important accomplishment in The Guardians is to give a unique literary voice to questions about what makes up a ‘family.’ ”
–El Paso Times

“A moving book that is both intimate and epic in its narrative.”
–Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #266377 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-09
• Released on: 2008-09-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The acclaimed author of Peel My Love Like an Onion tracks the perilous lives of Mexicans who illegally cross to the U.S. for work. Fifty-something Regina, a poorly paid aide in a public school on the U.S. side, is raising Gabo, the son of her brother, Rafa. Seven years have passed since Gabo's mother, Ximena, was murdered by coyotes, or paid traffickers, during a crossing, her body mutilated for salable organs. As the novel opens, Rafa, who has continued to travel back and forth for work, is due to arrive, but vanishes. With Miguel Betancourt, a divorced teacher at Regina's school in his mid-30s, Regina tries to confront the coyotes who were supposed to cross Rafa. In alternating first-person chapters, Castillo writes convincingly in the voices of the canny, struggling Regina, who remains a virgin after a being widowed in an unconsummated marriage; the desirous Miguel; the passionately religious Gabo; and El Abuelo Milton, Miguel's elderly grandfather. All are sucked into a vortex of horror as the search for Rafa consumes them. Castillo takes readers forcefully into the lives of the neglected and abused, but missing is a full emotional connection to the protagonists, who remain strangely absent even as their fates are sealed. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* "I don't think they could come up with a horror movie worse than the situation we got going on en la frontera," muses Milton, a man who has seen it all and now, in old age, is nearly blind. Milton is one of four transfixing voices telling the grim story of life along the border between the U.S and Mexico. Castillo writes fiction and poetry of earthy sensuality, wry social commentary, and lyrical spiritualism that confront the cruel injustices accorded women and Mexicans in America, legal and otherwise. In this tightly coiled and powerful tale, Regina, a virgin-widow in her fifties living in rural New Mexico, cares for her unusually disciplined teenage nephew, Gabo, who believes he's destined for the priesthood. Gabo's father often crosses the border to visit, but this time something has gone wrong, and given the gruesome fate of Gabo's mother, there is cause for alarm. As Gabo intensifies his prayers and penance, Regina, a teacher's aide unaware of her allure, asks Miguel, a chivalrous activist history teacher, for help, and he, in turn, enlists his covertly resourceful grandfather, Milton. At once shatteringly realistic and dramatically mystical, Castillo's incandescent novel of suffering and love traces life's movement toward the light even in the bleakest of places. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Ana Castillo is the author of Peel My Love Like an Onion, So Far from God (a New York Times Notable Book), Sapogonia, and The Mixquiahuala Letters (winner of the American Book Award), as well as the short-story collection Loverboys. Her books of poetry include My Father Was a Toltec, I Ask the Impossible, and Watercolor Women Opaque Men (a novel in verse). She is the recipient of a Carl Sandburg Prize and a Southwestern Booksellers Award. She lives in New Mexico.


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

Realistic in every way
The Guardians is a true snapshot of what life on the Border can be. The Abuelo Milton is an great charachter. The use of the 4 voices is very interesting. It is a novel that made me smile at how realistic it is. I enjoyed this new book by Ana Castillo it is very different from her other books. I look forward to her next book.

No Man's Land
Ana Castillo's new novel The Guardians is set against a landscape rich in history and culture yet torn apart by some of today's biggest social dilemmas. The US-Mexican border towns of Cabuche and Juarez and the unforgiving desert that separates them are the backdrop for the story of Regina and her teenage nephew Gabriel and the search for Rafa - Regina's brother, Gabo's father - who has disappeared while illegally crossing the border. The search for Rafa leads to new friendships and crises and explores the effects that the trafficking of humans and drugs has on the lives of ordinary people. The narrative is told in the first-person by four characters: Regina, Gabriel, Miguel, and Miguel's grandfather, Milton. Miguel, a teacher at the school where Regina works, becomes an ally, as does his grandfather. Regardless of the geography, the lives, hopes, dreams and fears of these four people are not only believable, but also easy to relate to, making this a touching, witty and beautiful story.

As a first-time reader of Castillo's work, I was enthralled with her unique style of writing. Her mixture of English and Spanish is initially a bit uncomfortable until the storytelling takes over. For readers with no knowledge of Spanish this may make the going difficult, but, in most cases, the narrative itself allows the reader to deduce the translation. Ms. Castillo's writing style reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her cadence is lively yet almost poetic, rich in insight yet spoken in an everyman voice.

i expected to like this novel - the cover blurbs are great and the themes are urgent, but . . .
i expected to like this novel. The cover blurbs are great and the themes are urgent. Unfortunately, the novel itself veers between long stretches of dreadful plotlessness, highly improbable events that (finally) drive the plot forward, and seemingly endless pages filled with characters' musings to themselves.

It's not as if Ana Castillo's topics aren't engaging. She's telling a story about a family living on and fractured by the Mexican-American border. The characters include a man who vanished crossing the border with coyotes to rejoin his sister and son in the U.S. Years before, coyotes separated him from his wife, harvested her organs, and left her lying dead in the desert. The man's surviving son dreams of becoming a priest and finding his father as he navigates a gang-infested school. His guardian aunt, a teacher's aide, dreams of starting a business and relaxes by working in her garden. The aunt has body issues and is still a virgin since she did not consummate her marriage the day before her husband was sent overseas and killed in the military.

Castillo's didacticism is pronounced and inescapable. Characters constantly provide the details of their pasts and their reactions to current events in long monologues. Two of the main characters are schoolteachers and one of the teachers mourns how little the young people know about their own past. And so, the readers receive Castillo's history lessons and opinions about Mexican-American politics throughout the book.

The author's politics are equally unavoidable. Characters muse that we are brothers and sisters on both sides of the border and there should be no restrictions on people traveling north for economic reasons. Castillo's characters never consider the effect that the influx of low-wage, low-skill workers has on the job market and the wages and opportunities of Americans who are also trying to make a living working minimum wage jobs. She bolsters her opinions by having God himself provide a miraculous vision to two of her characters. Heavy-handed to say the least.

All in all, Castillo submits her readers to a tendentious session of proselytizing that often feels like a diatribe. One wishes the author was better able to make the truly pressing border issues come alive for her readers.