She often gets lost among her boisterous, overwhelming relations, and she turns inward rather than fight for attention. When we’re introduced to Lala, she’s gearing up for the family’s annual road trip from Chicago to Mexico City. (You’ll meet a lot of characters with nicknames they’ve earned the hard way.) Its focus is the members of the Reyes family: our heroine and narrator Lala her mother, father, and six older brothers assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins and the Little Grandfather and Awful Grandmother. This tale is carefully woven together to tell stories within stories that spiral and twist into intricate patterns as a web does - and as families do. Its story of one eventful summer - and the ripple effects of the aftermath - explores how family mythology is created from love and loss and lies and secrets. Vivid, funny, intimate, historical, it is a brilliant work destined to become a classic: a major new novel from one of our country’s most beloved storytellers.This is a sweeping, multi-generational family saga that vividly recreates family life in Mexico City, Chicago, and San Antonio. 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 Twenties - and finally, to Lala’s own difficult adolescence in the not-quite-promised land of San Antonio, Texas.Ĭaramelo is a vital, wise, romantic tale of homelands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to “the other side”, Mexico City. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl-makers.
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