Blood Fugues Book

Kenny's mother was Frances Boyle, an Irish girl from the Bronx; his father, Tommy Romero, was a Puerto Rican born in East Harlem. The firstborn and favorite of this Dublin—San Juan union bore his mother's easy-smiling Irish eyes and his father's air of quiet mystery.

His summer begins like others before: leaving the cradle of his Williamsburg home to work on a pastoral upstate farm. But soon he makes choices that bring him into direct conflict with nature and challenge his more primitive instincts for survival, while at home his family grapples with their tangled pasts and the consequences of decades of deceptions.

In sparse and elegant prose, Edgardo Vega Yunqué renders a tight, beautifully constructed novel about two families coming to terms with their stormy pasts and their hopes for the future.

Publishers Weekly

When star high school athlete Kenny Romero treks from 1980s upper Manhattan to his summer job at a dairy farm in upstate New York, he leaves behind a family plagued with secrets. Yunque's (No Matter How Much You Promise...) nicely turned fourth novel puts the Catholic, Irish- Puerto Rican Kenny in the fields: tending cows, taking in the landscape and frolicking with blonde Lutheran girlfriend Claudia. Meanwhile, Kenny's father and maternal uncle, crooked cops, get into deep trouble; his mother (nee Boyle) contemplates a painful decision; and his maternal grandmother clutches the keys to the family history (and has some skeletons of her own). When a pregnant cow trails off into the woods one night and Kenny embarks on a dangerous search, a family already fraying at the seams unravels. Yunque writes with grace, vividly evoking second-generation New York City Irish and Puerto Rican-American life, contrasting its tight-knit urban world with the bucolic calm of the country. Although the final chapter abruptly delivers a too-neat conclusion, Yunque concentrates on the intertwined Boyle-Romero relationships (where the men call one another Boylgado or O'Romer) fruitfully, and the whole coalesces into a moving family portrait. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.