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	Fletcher Agency Melissa Chinchillo
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English
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Fiction & Related items

WHERE WE COME FROM

Oscar Casares

From the acclaimed author of Brownsville and Amigoland - a stunning and timely new novel about a Mexican-American family in a Texas border town who reluctantly become involved in smuggling immigrants into the United States.

Brownsville, Texas, has a dangerous reputation: it sits on the U.S. side of the bridge into Matamoros, Mexico, a city controlled by notorious cartels. But that isn't why 12-year-old Orly doesn't want to visit. Though he's still grieving the death of his mother, his father, Victor, is making him spend the summer in Brownsville with his godmother, Nina. Now a successful ad executive in Houston, Victor was raised in Brownsville and thinks it will do Orly good to know about his less-privileged roots. But Nina, distracted by having to care for her elderly mother, seems only to have rules for Orly. In particular: Don't go near the back house. . .

Nina has spent her own life following rules and sacrificing her own desires for others' needs. But when a single act of kindness toward her desperate Mexican cleaning lady begins to spiral out of control, Nina risks exposure from all sides--not only from her curious godson and her controlling brother, but from ruthless human traffickers and the police. Now, Nina will have to face the secrets she's long kept if she has any hope of helping the people suddenly under her care.

Tackling the crisis of immigration from an unusual, deeply humane angle, Where We Come From explores the ways that family history shapes us, how secrets can burden us, and how finding compassion and understanding for others can ultimately set us free.

Oscar Casares is the author of Brownsville, a collection of stories that was an American Library Association Notable Book of 2004, and is now included in the curriculum at several American universities; and the novel Amigoland. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Copernicus Society of America, and the Texas Institute of Letters. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where he lives.

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Book Published 2019-05-21 by Knopf

Comments

Wildly beautiful, making you both emotional and amused, wistful and joyous, for the violent yet graceful world it entails, one that feels in turns immense and transient.

Potent...Powerful...A novel that addresses the complexities of immigration, identity, and assimilation while telling close, intimate stories...Each voice in this chorus has something urgent to say...Helping us learn the truth about who we are individually and as a society...Delivers a truly timeless emotional punch."

Oscar Cásares leads us with skill and unsentimental affection into the homes, backyards, and hiding places of his characters. Some are on the move, while others are where they've been for hundreds of years. Questions of justice and mercy haunt the lives of every character. InWhere We Come From, Oscar Cásares has written an absorbing novel that contains a fascinating world and, even better, gives a glimpse of what it takes to get along with strangers as we wish those strangers would get along with us.

Evenly and quickly paced . . . this novel is suffused with boredom and menacetwins of a fugitive existence, punctuated by moments of pure terror. . . . Cásares's characters are finely wrought. . . . Cásares doesn't flinch from the ugliness, neither does he hit you over the head with it. Cásares is making a bid for our humanity, but he isn't peddling fairy tales. Even so, the end . . . which is pitch-perfect, gave me goosebumps and left me nodding, with a small smile on my face.

I started reading this novel in the heart of winter and yet when I was done it appeared as if the sun was shining brightly and the birds were singing and the world was once again all bright and beautiful. . . . Casares has written the novel of our times.

Very few authors know the Texas border like Oscar Cásaresonly when you write home can you deliver laughter and sorrow in the same punch with such depth and sympathy. ButWhere We Come Fromis more than an enlightening tale about the multilayered emotional intricacies of life along the U.S.-Mexico line. It is a sweeping portrait of two kinless boys seeking for each other and the woman risking her all for them, the sons she'd have wanted for herself had life treated her gently. This novelit grabbed me and hasn't let go of me yet."

In this gentle novel, Cásares has done a beautiful job...creating a vivid portrait of a boy caught between two worlds. The story is a necessary exercise in empathy at a time when there is too little...[A] heartfelt story about an intensely timely subject that demands attention.

Where We Come Fromis a beautiful and powerful novel. Timely, yes, but it transcends our contemporary era through its focus on family, risk, and loyalty. Oscar Cásares writes with uncanny insight and compassion. Everyone should read this book.

Where We Come From seethes with the nearly silent desperation of people trying to survive in the shadows. This novel erupts like a slow-motion detonation, with a force that will ultimately lift you up and lay you flat. OscarCásares has written as true and timely a novel as I can imagine: a novel very much of our time, and timeless in its telling of human struggle and connection."

"[A] deeply human novel. . . . Concerned with what it means to make a life in a place where so many systems and institutions are designed to make you feel precarious and, in some way, permanently unrooted. . . . There are many moments of quiet power. . . . A story about the meaning of family and home.

A fantastic story of familial love that dares us to question the condition of our humanity.

Thoughtful and quietly suspenseful...While keeping the focus on family dynamics and the characters' internal struggles, Cásares frequently, and often heartbreakingly, sets this domestic story in a wider context by stepping back to investigate the stories of people with whom the main characters interact only tangentially (a waiter who provides room service for Orly's father in San Francisco; the gardener who cleans the gutters at Orly's house in Houston). With understated grace and without sermonizing, Cásares brilliantly depicts the psychological complexity of living halfway in one place and halfway in another.