With this collection of richly reconstructed scenes from his childhood and youth, Octavio Solis has created a vibrant collage of memories with an energy that reverberates throughout the reading experience. Passing through remembrances and thus musings on familial love and conflict, young passion and lust, a child's sense of freedom and constraint, racial conflicts across and alongside the border, one leaves this book a little wiser and also wondering about the lessons buried in our own stories. ( )

Not a misfire in this beautiful collection of essays chronicling growing up in El Paso. Several of these are as fine as any short story you'll ever read. ( )