This is an interesting well written book. A car accident between a rich environmentalist and an impoverished illegal immigrant is the backdrop for the rest of the novel. We learn about the lives of each of these characters. Candido lives like an animal in a Southern California Canyon with his wife America. She is pregnant and holds on to the dream that their circumstances will improve. The rich guy is a stay home dad writer whose wife is a real estate agent and they live in a privileged life wondering how best to build barriers in their subdivision to keep out the immigrants and other undesirables. This is a very bare bones explanation of this novel, which is complex with many different messages and themes. Overall it was superbly written but I was left unsatisfied with the ending. Here are my thoughts on the novel though (warning don't read further if you don't want spoilers):
1. Candido's life had NO silver lining, it continued to get worse and worse. It was too the point of "too much"...
2. I get the feeling the story was less about the characters and more about the concepts, this helped me with the very ambigious ending which really did not provide much of a conclusion.
3. I think he hit us over the head with his message and it kind of nauseated me by its conclusion.
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