Reviews for The Only Thing I Have

The average rating for The Only Thing I Have based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-10-10 00:00:00 Danny Yang These stories reminded me of those by Alice Munro in that they are about ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. Except that with these people there is something off kilter and unsettling. In "Fatty", neighbours are intent upon getting a fat man to leave the neighbourhood. In "One Last Note" Petra and David, a married couple, organize their chores to be done with post-it notes stuck to the fridge - they "liked to know what had to be done." Petra discovers a note in her datebook saying "Kill David" and David finds one in the book he is reading, "Kill Petra". In "Jedidiah's Wife" a husband brings home a marrow squash as a gift for his wife, thinking it feels just like an infant. His wife instantly adopts the infant as her child. I don't know what a "marrow" squash looks like. I wonder if it is the same as a butternut squash. Certainly the colour of a butternut squash is almost flesh-like and it is smooth like a baby's bum. I imagine a horrible fate for this squash when, like all infants inevitably do, it throws itself off the bed when its otherwise diligent mother has her back turned not knowing that her kid is about to become mobile. Most of the stories are short, like little hors d'oeuvres - strange little bits that you can't get enough of.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-13 00:00:00 Seth Whitney One of my top favorite books of all times. And not because Latina discourse is The Thing right now; I think most people never really get past the first 50 pages (including those academics who should know better) because it's challenging and -- I believe -- helpfully marginalizing to the Anglophone reader. The plot is circuitous, anti-teleological, and thoroughly rasquache in the political sense of the term. This could be the best Chicana novel, defining the new Chicano experience, a perspective refreshingly divergent from the old-school Chicano machismo and looking instead toward a new identity, a new narrative.