Chasing Shadows: Stories

By Lucrecia Guerrero

Lucrecia Guerrero's shimmering debut collection paints a vivid, beautiful, and haunting portrait of life in a fictional U.S./Mexican border town as it traces the crossed paths of a cast of characters whose lives intersect in surprising ways. By turns funny, poetic, and clear-sighted, appealing to readers of Laura Esquivel, Isabel Allende, and Sandra Cisneros, Guerrero's stories reveal the moments in which we consciously and unconsciously reveal ourselves. A mother and twenty-year U.S. citizen still ashamed of her "imperfect" immigrant background, agrees to report illegals at the border with a pair of loaned binoculars. A local man's rough but naive past lets him confuse a momentary connection with a female bus passenger as part of an entire romantic future in which he has no place. An aging and meticulous dandy known as the "White Dove" is accompanied by his daughter to meet an old friend who she secretly knows will never arrive. Two young brothers infatuated with the same self-possessed girl adopt different attitudes to sweet and shocking result. As their lives interweave between the stories, the resonance of their hopes and fears in shared circumstance draw a deep sense of collective emotional longing and a sense of place that is simply unforgettable.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811827941
• ISBN13: 9780811827942
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.9" x 0.6" x 5.1"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Brava!

Re: The Kirkus Review. Lucrecia Guerrero paints portraits in miniature of small-town life. So did Sherwood Anderson in "Winesburg, Ohio." So why isn't Anderson dinged for "small" themes? At any rate, Guerrero's interwoven collection of stories in the fictional border town of Mesquite (cut down the middle by a fence that separates the US side from the Mexican side) draws us in with simple, precise poetry and characters that continue to haunt the imagination long after reading about them. They are indeed chasing "shadows" -- of love, prosperity, identity, justice. Some of them find what they want, however fleetingly. But though there are grim moments in these stories, the overwhelming compassion and affection that Guerrero has for these people shines through. She knows them -- their voices, their houses, their clothes, their motives. And by the time I finished reading this book, I felt like I knew them, too -- and was the better for it.

Not Slightly Slight

The Kirkus reviewer takes a safe anonymous potshot at Guerrero's marvelous book. You'll note the same sort of drygulching of every Arizona-themed book in Kirkus; the same coward writes 'em all.Lucrecia Guerrero is a wonderful writer; her prose is deceptively calm on the surface. Once you enter, you'll feel riptides if you pay attention. There is a periodic surge of genius in the Chicano/Latino literary world, and currently there are several very exciting talents emerging. Among them (Diana Garcia, Carl Marcum, Rich Yanez, Jose Skinner), Guerrero shines. She is clearly a formidable talent, one we will hear much from in the future. I'm already hungry for her novel.

Great Read

The characters were so believable, and I liked the way they kept popping up in other stories. It made the stories read like a novel. I'm waiting for Guerrero's next book.

Chasing Shadows, a captivating read

Chasing Shadows, a collection of well-crafted stories, tells about an engaging cast of characters in a fictionalized town of Mesquite along the Arizona and Mexican border. While Sandra Cisneros in The House on Mango Street wrote about Latinos in Chicago, Guerrero chose the rural desert of Arizona to create a special place for some captivating characters and stories that are mysterious, humorous, dramatic and poetic. Her characters are strong and believable. It's Guerrero's masterful and brilliant writing that makes her characters come alive. As the book opens, Cookie McDonald, formerly Cuca, now a U.S. citizen was an illegal immigrant from Mexico more than twenty years ago. She is afraid of what the sun might do to her skin and turns in Mexicans to the border patrol. She is the epitome of La Malinche (Indian translator and mistress of the conquering Hernán Cortés who conquered the Aztec Empire of Mexico). Some of the town's people refer to her as La Malinche. In "The Curse," Flaco, a young boy of eleven, is infatuated by Tonantzin, a young girl, whom his older brother Riquis thinks is a witch. Tonantzin, somewhat self-possessed, but in a big way is the opposite of La Malinche. Riquis, I suspect, also likes her. He just doesn't dig being rejected for such a little thing as being a smelly tough kid and stinker. In the stories, Joaquin de la Torre, a young Chicano champion and role model for justice is good looking and smart, but his character might have been developed more as I want to learn more about him. Then there is Blanca Rosa del Rio, Francisco López's entrancing dream love who he meets for the first time coming off the bus at the Mesquite bus station.Dolores Durán is a school teacher that somehow managed to get an education, but somehow doesn't manage to win at love and is looking for love in all the wrong places. These are just a few of the characters that make for some wonderful story telling that is vivid, haunting, and captivating.Guerrero's language is the language of the border, authentically capturing the culture of this region of the Southwest. It's real, in some places poetic.Guerrero's characters intersect with one another as stories are interwoven with suspense and surprises. Mesquite is a place that could have been developed by Laura Esquivel, Rudolfo Anaya, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but it was written in a masterful and beautiful way by Lucrecia Guerrero. This is a tribute to Guerrero's creativity and style. This is Guerrero's first book. It's a captivatingly good read.