Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories

It's no easy trick to weave three generations into fifteen stories, tracing lines of heredity, loyalty, and betrayal, holding onto a dozen and more characters as they shape-shift across leaps in time and circumstance. With Rudy Vallee and then West Side Story and then the Carpenters playing in the background, the stories follow the line of assimilation as Miscolta's familia spreads from Mexico to California and across the West, but none of their paths is direct. She grounds you in the kind of fully imagined realism that makes you feel like you know these characters well enough to fill in the spaces between the stories yourself.