VivirLatino

With a title like Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories, you expect characters haunted by their pasts and present, what you don’t expect is to be so drawn into the stories. Like gawking at a car wreck, I couldn’t pull myself away from the dark histories of the characters that Lorraine M. Lopez created. What I couldn’t decide though was if I felt bad for how they were written or for the circumstances the author places them in.

Published by BKMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Lopez’s 10 short stories are set mostly in the south, specifically Georgia, and focus on family relationships with women centered in each story. Only two of these stories connect to each other, “The Flood” and “The Landscape”. In those stories an educated woman struggle with raising the bi-racial daughter of a drug addicted cousin while maintaining her own personal relationship. This is a recurring theme, women taking on the burdens of other less fortunate women and the men that put up with it.

In “Sugar Boots” and “Women Speak” we read of grandmothers taking care of their grandchild because of incarcerated mothers or mothers who struggling with mental illness. After finishing the well written collection, I wonder if too many of the female characters, some who are Latina, play too much of the martyr in the name of the more absent tragic female characters. Take Miss Yolanda in “This Gifting”, as seen thorough the eyes of her Japanese student Daisuke. Are we expected to feel worse for the mother visiting her daughter in jail or la hija?

The stories in this collection are complex with equally complex characters. I need to sit with my feelings on the treatment of women in the stories but that may not be a bad thing and may be exactly what Lopez intended.

The book is 266 pages and retails for $16.95. You can purchase the book through SPD/Small Press Distribution.