Caramelo (Today Show Book Club #9)

The celebrated author of The House on Mango Street gives us an extraordinary new novel, told in language of blazing originality: a multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancythe very stuff of life.

Lala Reyes grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl, makers. The striped caramelo rebozo is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lalas possession. The novel opens with the Reyes annual car tripa caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrelsfrom Chicago to the other side: Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her familys stories, separating the truth from the healthy lies that have ricocheted from one generation to the next. We travel from the Mexico City that was the Paris of the New World to the music-filled streets of Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twentiesand, finally, to Lalas own difficult adolescence in the not-quite-promised land of San Antonio, Texas.

Caramelo is a romantic tale of homelands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. Vivid, funny, intimate, historical, it is a brilliant work destined to become a classic: a major new novel from one of our countrys most beloved storytellers.