In L.A. Weather, I tell the story of the three Alvarado sisters and their parents trying to make sense of their lives as they realize how much they need each other. I also used L.A.’s droughts and fires as metaphors for the secrets and heartbreaks of this Mexican-American family."
New this week to the New York Times Best Selling book list, L.A. Weather is #14. Kirkus reviews quotes it as “A warmhearted domestic drama with political undercurrents [which] makes for fun reading.”
After completing seventeen books in the Gamache series by Louise Penny, I was in dire need of branching out in my reading choices. I became aware of L.A. Weather as a September pick by the Reese Witherspoon book club. I tend to like this book club's selections as being a bit more upbeat than those on Oprah's roster. Indeed there are a lot of heartbreaks in the Alvarado family, but the way the family all cling to and support each other throughout substantiates my statement about Reese's Book Club.
The book reads like a telenovela, a Spanish soap opera of sorts, and the author admits to having been raised on that genre. The dramatic events in this novel are numerous: near drowning, divorce, failing lethargic marriage, miscarriages, in vitro fertilization, infidelity, bankruptcy, cleptomania, brain tumors, teenage pregnancy, gender identity, drought, flood, fire, El Niño, global warming, loss of culture. The assortment and quantity is quite amazing for one book.
All is far from negative, however. Three daughters have successful careers. Claudia the eldest is a famous television chef, Olivia the middle is an architect with a great talent for flipping homes, Patricia the youngest is a whiz at social media and forecasting trends. The mother Keila is an upscale sculptor, profiting from the sales of her creations in galleries. The father Oscar is an astute business man, descendant from a wealthy family of landowners. Oscar's family background reminds me of the Italian heritage of the family in the 1995 movie A Walk in the Clouds and the vineyards that were their land legacy.
All of the Alvarado lifestyles are described through a hispanic perspective. Food choices are drawn from a litany of Spanish and Mexican dishes many of which I have never heard of; in truth, my eyes would glaze over while skimming those menu recounting paragraphs. Sunday dinners where the family faithfully gathers are to be envied. They are like the stereotypical New England clambake get togethers or the Gone with the Wind southern barbecues. These communal meals remind me of the Sunday meal scene from one of my favorite movies, the 1997 Fools Rush In, where Mathew Perry gets indoctrinated to Salma Hayak's Mexican family. Per imdb ... along with the marriage comes compromise of one's own cultural traditions.
Flipping houses by Olivia also reminds of the scene in Fools Rush In where, as a wedding gift, the family convenes to paint the modernly beige, conservatively neutral, interior of the couple's rental a riotous array of Mexican colors. Olivia in L.A. Weather admits that her "updating" the architecture of hispanic homes involves a nagging of cultural guilt due to compromising her heritage.
I enjoyed the immersion in another culture but the question still looms as to what is the storyline. The short answer: life. Oscar is now wallowing in a zombie state glued to the weather channel and the underlying mystery is why. How the family negotiates its trials and tribulations, submersed in the hispanic culture and cuisine, traveling the roads of adversities while driving on the freeways of the Los Angeles area, makes for an engaging story. Having been to and through Los Angeles, I recognized many of the street and freeway names such as Mulholland Drive and I-405; I suspect readers local to the area will be familiar with many more, likely even groaning at some of the bumper-to-bumper backup traffic memories. Initially scoffing at the improbability of the sheer quantity of misfortunes in the Alvarado family's lives, I decided to settle back and immerse myself in the ride, soaking in how they handled each problem as a team, in an enviable "no man is an island approach". As I wrote this review, my opinion of L.A. Weather rose, once I recognized what happened was not important. How the family responds, is what is endearing. I wavered between three and four stars but settled on four stars.
Fools Rush In is one of my favorite movies! I added this book to my ever-growing "to read" list!
ReplyDeleteI just finished reading this book and overrated it with two stars. It took me way too long to read and it was probably because I thought it was mostly terrible. It was, in my opinion, poorly written; the story line was blah; the characters and all their stealing and cheating and divorcing were horribly unlikeable; and I was so annoyed at all the rich, high-end L.A. references - from designer clothes to cars, to houses, to furnishings. I don't know how the women in the story were so rich (or could at least throw down money for everything with a luxury name brand) when they seemed to work so little and the moms seemed to spend very little time or thought on their kids (especially the mom of the young twins). It was like the author just wanted to show off everything that she thought L.A. entails - money, money, money, shopping, cheating on your husband, divorcing your husband, anything and everything progressive (I mean, she even worked a thruple into the story), poor Mexicans happy to work for rich people, lying, and stealing. Two stars was definitely too generous in my mind!
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